A view of the rubble in Jabalia, northern Gaza, after heavy Israeli bombardment. Credit: UNICEF/Rawan Eleyan

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 2026 (IPS)

Roughly six months after the ceasefire in the Occupied Palestinian Territory went into effect, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains precariously fragile, despite a relative decline in hostilities. The crisis, marked by ongoing Israeli airstrikes and shelling, continued blockades on humanitarian aid, and widespread displacement, has pushed the majority of Palestinians in Gaza to the brink. Amid the vast scale of needs, basic services are increasingly strained, and humanitarian experts warn that the situation could deteriorate further in the coming months unless sustained aid and funding are secured.

A new report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (UNRWA) on the current conditions in Gaza confirmed a continuation of airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire across multiple areas, including Beit Lahia, Jabalia, Deir al Balah, Khan Younis, Rafah, and Bureij. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that since the eruption of hostilities on October 7, 2023, approximately 72,315 Gazans have been killed and another 172,137 injured.

“The scale and pattern of these actions, occurring alongside mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes and land in Gaza shows once again the ongoing broader policy of ethnic cleansing across the occupied Palestinian territory,” said a group of United Nations (UN) experts on April 13. “This cycle of displacement, terror, and targeted attacks serves an ultimate purpose: to make life unbearable for Palestinians and permanently force them from their land…Targeting areas known to shelter displaced civilians is a grave breach of international humanitarian law and is a grim reminder of the urgent need for international action and accountability.”

According to Palestine’s Ministry of Health, at least 32 Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces in early April alone. Airstrikes, gunfire, and shelling are daily occurrences, with women, children, disabled persons, humanitarian workers, and journalists being routinely targeted. On April 9, a young girl was killed by Israeli gunfire in a crowded classroom-turned-makeshift encampment.

“For the past 10 days, Palestinians are still being killed and injured in what is left of their homes, shelters, and tents of displaced families, on the streets, in vehicles, at a medical facility and in a classroom,” said United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. “Movement itself has become a life-threatening activity. Incidents of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces while walking, driving, or standing outside are recorded nearly every day.”

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) also confirmed that there have been increasing cases of Israeli forces killing Palestinians based on their proximity to the “yellow line”, a line of demarcation that divides the Palestinian-controlled areas of Gaza and the Israeli-controlled areas. “Targeting civilians not taking direct part in hostilities is a war crime, regardless of their proximity to deployment lines,” said Türk

On April 6, Israeli forces shot at vehicles from the World Health Organization (WHO), killing a driver. Two days later, Israeli drone strikes killed Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Washah in Gaza City, marking the 294th Palestinian journalist to be killed by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023. Additionally, Israel has continued to ban international journalists from accessing Gaza, further compounding the regional decline of journalistic freedom.

“The number of journalists and humanitarian personnel killed in Gaza is unprecedented, and further compounds civilian harm as it makes reporting on the situation and responding to its humanitarian implications life-threatening,” added Türk.

Internal displacement is particularly rampant, with OCHA estimating that routine evacuation orders and bombardment have affected roughly 92 percent of all housing across the enclave, with the vast majority of affected communities having been displaced multiple times. Civilians residing in overcrowded, makeshift encampments are disproportionately affected by insecurity, freezing temperatures, building collapse, and a severe shortage of humanitarian aid and basic services.

Humanitarian movement remains severely constrained, with all UNRWA staff banned from accessing the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory since March 2025. The agency, which has long acted as a critical lifeline for Palestinians, has pre-positioned food parcels, flour, and shelter supplies at Gaza’s borders, which could help hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

Thousands of Palestinians across the enclave are in urgent need of medical care as Gaza’s health system nears the brink of collapse, facing severe shortages of supplies amid an influx of injured and ill patients. Medications are critically short in supply, and UNRWA has reported a sharp uptick in cases of ectoparasitic infections such as scabies and fleas, as well as chickenpox and other skin diseases, which have been linked to disrupted water and hygiene (WASH) services, overcrowding, and pests.

Despite these challenges, humanitarian experts have expressed optimism that the situation in Gaza could improve as access constraints begin to fade. Following nearly 40 days of closure, the critical Zikim crossing reopened in early April, allowing nutritional and health supplies to reach northern Gaza directly. UNRWA is currently supporting over 67,000 displaced individuals across 83 collective emergency shelters, with over 11,000 personnel providing lifesaving care.

UNRWA, in collaboration with WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and Palestine’s Ministry of Health, reached almost 2,100 children under three years of age with vaccinations between April 5 and 9. WHO and its partners have also been facilitating dozens of medical evacuations through the Rafah border crossing and providing access to medical care, food, water, and psychosocial services to returning Gazans.

The UN experts stressed that a definitive end to hostilities, an expansion of protection services, and the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid are crucial in coordinating an effective return to stability in Gaza. Additionally, the experts called on Israeli authorities to ensure a safe and dignified return to Gaza for displaced individuals, as well as the lifting of restrictions for UNRWA operations.

“We reiterate our call on States to bring Israel’s unlawful occupation to an end and ensure the immediate protection of civilians sheltering in displacement sites across the Gaza Strip, including by scaling up vital humanitarian assistance,” the experts said. “States must comply with their legal obligations. They must bring Israel’s unlawful occupation to an end, refrain from recognising it and withhold assistance to it, and take effective measures to ensure investigations and accountability for grave violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian Territory.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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CIVICUS discusses the spread of AI-powered surveillance in Africa with Wairagala Wakabi, executive director of the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) and co-editor of Smart City Surveillance in Africa: Mapping Chinese AI Surveillance Across 11 Countries, the latest report by the African Digital Rights Network (ADRN) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).

Wairagala Wakabi

How widespread is AI-powered surveillance in Africa?

Under the guise of reducing crime and fighting terrorism, at least 11 governments have invested over US$2 billion in AI-powered ‘smart city’ surveillance infrastructure: Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Governments are installing thousands of CCTV cameras linked to central command centres, paired with tools such as automatic number-plate recognition, biometric ID systems and facial recognition to track people and vehicles. The largest known investments are in Nigeria (over US$470 million), Mauritius (US$456 million) and Kenya (US$219 million), though the real total is likely much higher, since surveillance spending is often secret and the report covers only 11 of Africa’s 55 countries.

Despite being presented as tools for crime prevention, counter-terrorism, modernisation and urban management, these are not targeted security measures. They represent a broader shift toward continuous, population-level monitoring of public spaces, rolled out over the past five to ten years almost always without clear legal limits or public debate.

Are these systems achieving their stated purpose?

No, there is no compelling evidence that they have in any of the countries studied. Instead, the data points to a pattern of use that raises serious human rights concerns.

In Uganda and Zimbabwe, AI-powered surveillance including facial recognition is being used to suppress dissent rather than ensure public safety. Activists, critics of the government, opposition leaders and protesters are identified and monitored through this system, even after protests have ended. In Mozambique, smart CCTV systems have reportedly been installed in areas of strong political opposition, suggesting targeted rather than neutral surveillance.

In Senegal and Zambia, countries with relatively low terrorism threats, governments have still invested heavily, which calls into question the stated security rationale.

Across the countries studied, the scale of surveillance far exceeds any actual or perceived security threat, and the infrastructure is consistently being used to monitor dissent and consolidate state control rather than address genuine public safety needs.

Who’s supplying this technology?

While firms from Israel, South Korea and the USA supply surveillance technologies, Chinese companies are the primary suppliers and financiers. They typically offer end-to-end ‘smart city’ packages that include cameras, software platforms, data analytics systems, training and ongoing technical support. Many projects are backed by loans from Chinese state-linked banks, which makes them financially accessible in the short term but creates long-term dependencies on external vendors for maintenance, system management and upgrades.

This model undermines transparency. Procurement processes are opaque and civil society, the public and oversight institutions including parliaments rarely have information about how these systems operate, how data is stored or who has access to it. That lack of accountability is what makes abuse not just possible, but hard to detect or challenge.

What impact is this having on civic space?

This large-scale surveillance of public spaces is not legal, necessary or proportionate to the legitimate aim of providing security. Recording, analysing and retaining facial images of people in public without their consent interferes with their right to privacy and, over time, their willingness to move, assemble and speak freely.

The most immediate consequence is a chilling effect, particularly where civic space is already restricted. Knowing they can be identified and tracked, activists and journalists are less willing to attend protests for fear of later arrest or reprisals, and end up self-censoring. Civil society organisations also report heightened anxiety about the risks for their members and partners.

What should governments and civil society do?

None of the 11 countries studied have a legal framework capable of balancing the state’s security needs with its commitments to protect fundamental human rights. That must change. Governments must adopt clear regulations on surveillance, including restrictions on facial recognition and other AI tools, require independent human rights impact assessments before introducing new systems, make procurement and deployment processes transparent and establish strong oversight mechanisms, including judicial and parliamentary scrutiny, to prevent abuse.

Civil society should continue documenting abuses, raising public awareness and advocating for accountability, while also supporting affected people and communities through digital security support and legal assistance.

Technology-exporting states and donors must enforce stricter controls and safeguards on the export and financing of these tools, support rights-based approaches to digital governance and help fund independent monitoring and advocacy across Africa.

Without urgent action, these systems will continue to expand, and the rights of people across Africa will continue to shrink.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Technology: innovation without accountability CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
AI governance: the struggle for human rights CIVICUS Lens 11.Sep.2025
Facial recognition: the latest weapon against civil society CIVICUS Lens 23.May.2025

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Credit: 279photo/iStock by Getty Images. Source: IMF

By Hippolyte Balima, Andresa Lagerborg and Evgenia Weaver
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 16 2026 (IPS)

War is again defining the global landscape. After decades of relative calm following the Cold War, the number of active conflicts has surged in recent years to levels not seen since the end of the Second World War.

Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions and heightened security concerns are prompting many governments to reassess their priorities and spend more on defense.

Beyond their devastating human toll, wars impose large and lasting economic costs, and pose difficult macroeconomic trade-offs, especially for those countries where the fighting is taking place.

Even without active conflicts, rising defense spending can raise economic vulnerabilities in the medium term. After the war, governments face the urgent post-conflict task of securing durable peace and sustaining recovery.

In an era of proliferating conflicts, our research in two analytical chapters of the latest World Economic Outlook highlights the deep and prolonged economic harm inflicted by war, which has particularly affected sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

We also show that rising defense spending—which can boost demand in the short term—imposes difficult budgetary trade offs that make good policy design and lasting peace more important than ever.

Economic losses

For countries where wars occur, economic activity drops sharply. On average, output in countries where fighting takes place falls by about 3 percent at the onset and continues falling for years, reaching cumulative losses of roughly 7 percent within five years.

Output losses from conflicts typically exceed those associated with financial crises or severe natural disasters. Economic scars also persist even a decade later.

Wars also tend to have significant spillover effects. Countries engaged in foreign conflicts may avoid large economic losses—partly because there is no physical destruction on their own soil.

Yet, neighboring economies or key trading partners with the country where the conflict is taking place will feel the shock. In the early years of a conflict, these countries often experience modest declines in output.

Major conflicts—those involving at least 1,000 battle-related deaths—force difficult trade-offs in economies where they occur. Government budgets deteriorate as spending shifts toward defense and debt increases, while output and tax collection collapse.

These countries may also face strains on their external balances. As imports contract sharply because of lower demand, exports decrease even more substantially, resulting in a temporary widening of the trade deficit.

Heightened uncertainty triggers capital outflows, with both foreign direct investment and portfolio flows declining. This forces wartime governments to rely more heavily on aid and, in some cases, remittances from citizens abroad to finance trade deficits.

Despite these measures, conflicts contribute to sustained exchange rate depreciation, reserve losses, and rising inflation, underscoring how widening external imbalances amplify macroeconomic stress during wartime. Prices tend to increase at a pace higher than most of central banks’ inflation targets, prompting monetary authorities to raise interest rates.

Taken together, our findings show that major conflicts impose substantial economic costs and difficult trade-offs on economies that experience conflicts within their borders, as well as hurting other countries. And these costs extend well beyond short-term disruption, with enduring consequences for both economic potential and human well-being.

Spending trade-offs

More frequent conflicts and rising geopolitical tensions have also prompted many countries to reassess their security priorities and increase defense spending. Others plan to do so. This situation presents policymakers with a crucial question about trade-offs involved with such a boost to spending.

Our analysis looks at episodes of large buildups in defense spending in 164 countries since the Second World War. We find that these booms typically last nearly three years and increase defense spending by 2.7 percentage points of gross domestic product.

That’s broadly similar to what is required by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members to reach the 5 percent of GDP defense spending target by 2035.

Ramping up defense spending primarily acts as a positive demand shock, boosting private consumption and investment, especially in defense-related sectors. This can raise both economic output and prices in the short term, requiring close coordination with monetary policy to temper inflationary pressures.

Overall, the aggregate effects on output of scaling up defense spending are likely modest. Increases in defense spending typically translate almost one for one into higher economic output, rather than having a bigger multiplier effect on activity.

That said, the multiplier or ripple effects of such spending vary widely depending on how outlays are sustained, financed and allocated, and how much equipment is imported.

For instance, output gains are smaller and external balances deteriorate when the stimulus is partly spent to import foreign goods, which is especially the case for arms importers. By contrast, a buildup of defense spending that prioritizes public investment in equipment and infrastructure, together with less fragmented procurement and more common standards, would expand market size, support economies of scale, strengthen industrial capacity, limit import leakages, and support long-term productivity growth.

The choice of how to finance defense spending entails critical trade-offs. Defense spending booms are mostly deficit-financed in the near-term, while higher revenues play a larger role in later years of defense spending booms and when the defense spending buildup is expected to be permanent.

The reliance on deficit financing can stimulate the economy in the short term, but strain fiscal sustainability over the medium term, particularly in countries with limited room in government budgets.

Deficits worsen by about 2.6 percentage points of GDP, and public debt increases by about 7 percentage points within three years of the start of a boom (14 percentage points in wartime). The resulting increase in public debt can crowd out private investment and offset the initial expansionary effect of defense spending.

The buildup of fiscal vulnerabilities can be mitigated by durable financing arrangements, especially when the increase in defense spending is permanent. However, raising revenues come at the cost of reducing consumption and dampening the demand boost, while re-ordering budget priorities tends to come at the expense of government spending on social protection, health, and education.

Policies for recovery

Our analysis also shows that economic recoveries from war are often slow and uneven, and crucially depend on the durability of peace. When peace is sustained, output rebounds but often remains modest relative to wartime losses. By contrast, in fragile economies where conflict flares up again, recoveries frequently stall.

These modest recoveries are driven primarily by labor, as workers are reallocated from military to civilian activities and refugees gradually return, while capital stock and productivity remain subdued.

Early macroeconomic stabilization, decisive debt restructuring, and international support—including aid and capacity development—play a central role in restoring confidence and promoting recovery. Recovery efforts are most effective when complemented by domestic reforms to rebuild institutions and state capacity, promote inclusion and security, and address the lasting human costs of conflict, including lost learning, poorer health, and diminished economic opportunities.

Importantly, effective post-war recovery requires comprehensive and well-coordinated policy packages. Such an approach is far more effective than piecemeal measures. Policies that simultaneously reduce uncertainty and rebuild the capital stock can reinforce expectations, encourage capital inflows, and facilitate the return of displaced people.

Ultimately, successful post-war recovery lays the foundation for stability, renewed hope and improved livelihoods for communities affected by conflict.

This IMF blog is based on Ch. 2 of the April 2026 World Economic Outlook, “Defense Spending: Macroeconomic Consequences and Trade-Offs,” and Ch. 3, “The Macroeconomics of Conflicts and Recovery.” For more on fragile and conflict-affected states: How Fragile States Can Gain by Strengthening Institutions and Core Capacities.

IPS UN Bureau

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The Rohingya did not choose dependency on aid. It was created by the restrictions surrounding them. Credit: UNHCR/Amanda Jufrian

By Mohammed Zonaid
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Apr 14 2026 (IPS)

While global attention right now is on escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, another crisis continues quietly in Bangladesh.

Beginning April 1, 2026, the World Food Programme (WFP) introduced a revised Targeting and Prioritisation Exercise (TPE) for Rohingya refugees living in camps in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, according to a statement released by the United Nations in Bangladesh on April 2.

Under the new system, refugee households will receive food assistance of $12, $10, or $7 per person per month, depending on their assessed level of food insecurity. Previously, all refugees received $12 per person.

On paper, vulnerability-based targeting appears reasonable. In many humanitarian crises, such systems help ensure that limited resources reach those most in need. However, the Rohingya context is different.

Nearly nine years after fleeing genocide and persecution in Myanmar, more than one million Rohingya refugees remain confined to camps in Bangladesh, according to the latest data from UNHCR Bangladesh including 144,456 biometrically identified new arrivals and 1,040,408 Registered refugees 1990s & post-2017. 78% them are Women and children.

Unlike refugees in many other countries, Rohingya in Bangladesh have extremely limited freedom of movement and cannot legally work or run small businesses within the camps. Refugees are also not formally employed by humanitarian organizations—except as volunteers receiving small daily allowances. As a result, they remain almost entirely dependent on humanitarian assistance.

Within this context, reducing aid raises serious concerns. When refugees are not permitted to engage in meaningful economic activity, food insecurity becomes less a household condition and more a structural outcome.

Humanitarian agencies have provided life-saving support for years, and their efforts should not be overlooked. But survival is not the same as stability. Instead of creating pathways toward self-reliance for Rohingya and local communities in Cox’s Bazar who are affected due to refugee statements, the current system has largely institutionalized dependency.

Many programs labeled as “livelihood initiatives” have not produced meaningful outcomes. Skills training programs—such as electrical repair or other technical courses—often fail to translate into real opportunities because refugees do not own motorbikes, electricity access is limited in many camp areas, refugees cannot legally move beyond the camps to seek work, and humanitarian organizations don’t employ trained refugees within their own operational structures.

This raises difficult questions: Why invest donor resources in skills that cannot realistically be applied? And what long-term strategy do these initiatives serve?

The new targeting model categorizes refugees as extremely food insecure, highly food insecure, or food insecure. Some vulnerable households—such as those led by elderly individuals, persons with disabilities, or children—will continue receiving the highest level of assistance.

Yet the broader reality remains unchanged: the entire Rohingya population in Bangladesh faces severe restrictions on economic participation.

Recent protests in the camps are often described as reactions to ration reductions. In reality, they reflect deeper concerns about uncertainty and the absence of long-term planning. Refugees are asking a simple question: What happens if funding declines further in the future? Where will we go? Well Bangladesh alone will be left dealing with the Rohingya crisis?

They want to send a message to the world: dependency on aid was designed around the Rohingya. It is time to think beyond relief and give them the tools to stand on their own feet.

Long-term strategic thinking is urgently needed. This includes serious discussions about ensuring safe and dignified lives in the camps until the Rohingya are able to return to Myanmar, expanding economic participation for refugees, and creating policies that allow them to contribute economically while remaining under appropriate regulation.

At the same time, Bangladesh itself is going through a transitional period after the election, and the new government and said it will work closely to make Rohingya repatriation possible and shared data on 8.29 lakh Rohingyas with Myanmar.

But the Rohingya crisis cannot be a lesser priority, the new government also needs to recognize that prolonged displacement cannot be managed indefinitely through restriction and relief alone—the same approach that largely characterized the policies of the previous government.

Carefully regulated work opportunities—such as camp-based enterprises, pilot employment schemes, or limited work authorization programs—could help reduce humanitarian dependency while preserving government oversight.

If even one or two members of each refugee household were allowed to work legally under controlled frameworks, humanitarian costs could gradually decline, camp economies could stabilize, and youth frustration could decrease.

Most importantly, dignity could begin to return.

After nearly nine years, international agencies have managed one of the world’s largest refugee operations with remarkable logistical capacity. Yet the central question remains: what durable systems have been created to help refugees stand on their own feet?

As global funding pressures increase and donor fatigue grows, humanitarian assistance is being recalibrated downward. Without structural reforms, this risks managing dependency more efficiently rather than reducing it.

The Rohingya did not choose dependency on aid. It was created by the restrictions surrounding them. Food assistance remains essential. But the future of an entire population cannot be defined solely by ration cards and vulnerability categories.

The Rohingya crisis requires more than improved targeting of aid. It requires policies that combine protection with participation and living with safety.

The world has learned how to feed the Rohingya.

The real test is whether it will allow them to stand—until the day they can safely return home to Myanmar with rights, safety, and dignity.

Otherwise, families quietly reduce meals. Young people seek unsafe informal labor. The risks of child labor, early marriage, unsafe migration. and involvement in illicit activities increase. When opportunity disappears, desperation fills the gap.

Mohammed Zonaid is a Rohingya SOPA 2025 honoree, freelance journalist, award-winning photographer, and fixer. He works with international agencies and has contributed to Myanmar Now, The Arakan Express News, The Diplomat Magazine, Frontier Myanmar, Inter Press Service, and the Myanmar Pressphoto Agency.

IPS UN Bureau

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Amir Saeid Iravani, Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Oritro Karim
NEW YORK, Apr 10 2026 (IPS)

The past several weeks have marked a significant escalation in hostilities across the Middle East, with tensions rising among Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and the United States following large-scale exchanges of bombardment. Recent statements from U.S. President Donald Trump, including threats of extensive destruction in Iran, have further inflamed regional tensions and complicated ongoing diplomatic efforts. Humanitarian experts warn that these developments risk further destabilizing cross-border relations and could trigger a broader regional conflict.

“Every day this war continues, human suffering grows. The scale of devastation grows. Indiscriminate attacks grow,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “The spiral of death and destruction must stop. To the United States and Israel, it is high time to stop the war that is inflicting immense human suffering and already triggering devastating economic consequences. Conflicts do not end on their own. They end when leaders choose dialogue over destruction. That choice still exists. And it must be made – now.”

In late February, Israel coordinated a series of airstrikes targeting Iranian military infrastructure, triggering retaliatory drone and missile strikes from Iran. According to figures from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), over 3.8 million Iranians have been impacted by the war in Iran as of early April. Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MoHME) reports that over 2,100 civilians have been killed as of April 3, including 216 children, 251 women and 24 health workers. Over 1,880 children, 4,610 women, and 116 health workers have been injured in that same period.

The scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure across Iran has been particularly severe. The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) estimates that roughly 115,193 civilian structures have sustained significant damage, including at least 763 schools. Israeli airstrikes have targeted numerous densely populated areas and critical civilian infrastructures, including airports, residential areas, hospitals, schools, industrial facilities, cultural heritage sites, water infrastructure, and a power plant in Khorramshahr, as well as nuclear facilities in Khonab, Yazd, and Bushehr.

Iran’s healthcare system has borne a massive toll, with damage to over 442 health facilities across the nation, disrupting access to lifesaving care for over 10 million people, including 2.2 million children. The Pasteur Institute of Iran—one of the oldest research and public health centers in the Middle East, and a critical source of vaccines for infectious diseases—has been severely damaged, leaving thousands of children increasingly vulnerable. Tofigh Darou, a key producer of pharmaceutical products for chronic conditions such as cancer, has been destroyed, raising broader concerns of a severe, nationwide health crisis.

These challenges are especially pronounced for Iran’s growing population of internally displaced persons (IDPs), which has swelled to approximately 3.2 million since the escalation of hostilities. Iran also currently hosts over 1.65 million refugees. These vulnerable communities are in dire need of access to basic services, many of which have been severely disrupted. IDPs and refugee communities face significant protection risks, alongside critical shortages of healthcare, food, clean water, and financial support for basic needs and relocation assistance.

“Unprovoked attacks by the US and Israel — launched amid diplomatic negotiations and without authorisation from the Security Council — violate the fundamental prohibition on the use of force, sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and the duty to peacefully settle disputes under Article 2 of the UN Charter. They also violate the right to life,” said a coalition of UN experts on April 4. “The targeting of civilians, educational facilities, and medical institutions constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law….Calls by the US and Israel for Iranians to seize control of their own government are reckless and put countless civilian lives at risk.”

On April 8, the U.S. brokered a two-week ceasefire with Iran, mediated by Pakistan, in an effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway and one of the world’s most prominent oil and gas passes, and to de-escalate tensions in the 2026 Iran War. Immediately following the implementation of the ceasefire, Israel launched a series of large-scale airstrikes in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah sites, resulting in widespread damage to civilian infrastructure and a significant loss of human life.

Attacks across Lebanon have been widespread, with Israeli authorities reporting that they had carried out approximately 100 strikes across the country within 10 minutes. Southern Lebanon has experienced immense destruction, along with the southern suburbs of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley, all reporting significant damage to civilian infrastructures. Attacks have been reported in the vicinity of the Hiram Hospital in Al-Aabbassiye near Tyre, as well as on an ambulance on the Islamic Health Authority in Qlaileh, causing three civilian deaths.

Figures from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) show that more than 1,500 people had been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon between early March and April 8, including over 200 women and children. Additional figures from the UN reveal that the attacks on April 8 alone resulted in more than 200 deaths and over 1,000 injuries across Lebanon. Many victims are believed to be still trapped beneath the rubble of destroyed infrastructure, as hospitals and rescue teams struggle to respond amid the overwhelming scale of casualties and urgent humanitarian needs.

“The scale of the killing and destruction in Lebanon today is nothing short of horrific,” said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk. “Such carnage, within hours of agreeing to a ceasefire with Iran, defies belief. It places enormous pressure on a fragile peace, which is so desperately needed by civilians. The scale of such actions, coupled with statements by Israeli officials indicating an intention to occupy or even annex parts of southern Lebanon, is deeply troubling. Efforts to bring peace to the wider region will remain incomplete as long as the Lebanese people are living under continuing fire, forcibly displaced, and in fear of further attacks.”

On April 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a series of posts on social media in which he warned of potential large-scale destruction in Iran, which elicited significant concern and outrage from regional and international actors. His subsequent partial withdrawal of these comments did little to ease concerns and only further underscored the volatility of the U.S.’s role in foreign affairs.

“Today, the President of the United States again resorted to language that is not only deeply irresponsible but profoundly alarming, declaring that ‘the whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back’,” Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council on April 7. He added that Trump’ s comments only acted as an open declaration of “intent to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity”, underscoring the troubling precents that the U.S. is setting for international conflicts.

“The announcement of a two-week ceasefire is a welcome step but it is partial, fragile, and incomplete. Most urgently, it does not include Lebanon, where I visited IRC programs last week and where airstrikes, evacuation orders and active hostilities not only continue to threaten civilians but intensify. A ceasefire that leaves one front of the conflict burning risks prolonging the crisis, not resolving it,” said David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.

“The war in Iran has already triggered a dangerous domino effect, spreading humanitarian need, economic shock, and instability across the region and beyond. This moment must be used to expand the ceasefire, ensure the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and other critical routes remain open to allow scaled-up humanitarian aid and essential supplies to reach those in need, and to stabilize economies under strain. Without that, the gap between rising needs and shrinking resources will only deepen. Civilians must be given the space to begin rebuilding their lives with dignity which can only happen if there is a permanent cessation in hostilities,” he continued.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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We live in a century of extraordinary achievement.

Humanity has split the atom, mapped the genome, and sent astronauts to the Moon, with plans now underway to reach Mars. Our knowledge has expanded, our tools have become more powerful, and our capacity to shape the world around us exceeds anything previous generations could have imagined. We communicate instantaneously across continents, diagnose diseases earlier, monitor climate patterns in real time, and design artificial intelligences that can aid in everything from medicine to climate modelling.

James Alix Michel

We possess the means to protect our planet, restore degraded ecosystems, and build a future that is regenerative and sustainable. The Earth still holds enough resources to feed, shelter, and nourish every person on it.

The science is clear, the solutions are known, and the pathways are increasingly understood. We know how to phase out the most damaging fossil fuels, how to design circular economies, and how to restore forests and oceans on a large scale. The question is not whether we can heal, but whether we choose to.

Instead of using this knowledge to nurture life, we spend trillions on weapons, war, and systems of domination. We continue to refine instruments of destruction with the same ingenuity that once helped us survive as hunter gatherers.

From spears and arrows to missiles and nuclear arsenals, technology has evolved far faster than our moral imagination. The same species that can design satellites and decode life itself is also capable of perfecting the means to erase itself. We have turned our curiosity into a danger when it is not paired with humility.
War has become normalised. We export violence beyond our borders, fuel conflicts in distant lands, and justify the dehumanisation of others in the name of power, ideology, or fear.

In doing so, we risk losing sight of what it means to be human: to care, to share, to protect, and to build together. Our intelligence has grown, but our ethics have often lagged behind. We have impressive control over external environments, yet we struggle to govern our own impulses—greed, resentment, the desire for domination over cooperation.

We still behave as if survival depends on conquest, as though strength is measured by the capacity to destroy rather than by the courage to cooperate.

In that sense, humanity is trapped between two identities: one capable of profound creativity and compassion, and another still governed by ancient instincts of greed, lust for power, and tribal dominance.

We have evolved in technology, but not always in spirit. We built institutions meant to protect rights and distribute justice, yet those very institutions are often weaponised or hollowed out by self interest.

The Earth is still rich enough to nourish us all. The ocean still teems with life, the land can still grow food, and the air can still be cleansed. We have the tools to live in balance, instead of in excess. We can choose renewable energy systems that do not poison our skies, farming practices that restore soil instead of depleting it, and urban designs that integrate nature instead of paving it over.

The problem is not scarcity, but choices—choices that prioritise short term gain over long term survival, accumulation over equity, and fear over trust.

If humanity is to truly evolve, it must move beyond the old logic of domination and embrace a new ethic of stewardship. This is not a soft or sentimental vision. It is a hard, practical necessity if we want civilisation to continue.

Stewardship means recognising that power is not only the ability to control, but the responsibility to protect. It means designing economies that reward regeneration, not extraction; diplomacy that favours mediation over militarisation; and education systems that nurture empathy as much as efficiency.

Progress cannot be measured only by how far we can reach into space, or how fast we can compute. It must be measured by how well we can care for the planet and for one another. It must be measured by how peacefully we resolve our differences, how fairly we share resources, and how seriously we protect the rights of future generations.

True progress is the transition from a species that merely adapts to its environment, to one that consciously shapes it for the benefit of all life, not just a privileged few.

We have not lost our humanity. We have only forgotten it.
The challenge now is to rediscover it—not as a romantic ideal, but as a practical imperative.

In a world capable of such beauty, creativity, and connection, the only true insanity is the choice to destroy rather than to heal, to dominate rather than to share, and to fear rather than to love.

After all, the moon and the stars will remain, no matter how we choose; what is at stake is whether we will still be worthy of the Earth we were given.

That is the real test of our century. And it is one we must pass together.

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Credit: US Department of Defense / Wiki Commons

By Herbert Wulf
Apr 6 2026 (IPS)

 
Donald Trump ran on a platform of ending wars. After his success in Venezuela, he is intoxicated by his military achievements and is banking on regime change in several countries.

In a swift and decisive move, US forces abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the United States. The current government in Caracas has little choice but to largely submit to Washington’s dictates. Trump’s motives for the war against Iran remain unclear, partly because the US president has cited various reasons: to finally destroy the Iranian nuclear program, to end the Iranian threat to the Middle East, to support the Iranian people, and to overthrow the terrible regime in Tehran. He remains vague about his reasoning and seems to make off the cuff suggestions for regime change. Trump had a lofty idea at how he envisions the end of this war. He has suggested “unconditional surrender,” followed by his personal involvement in the selection of a successor: I must be involved in picking Iran’s next leader.

The swift victory against Iran failed to materialize, an end to the war is not in sight, and a new leader has been chosen without Trump’s involvement. The structures of the mullah regime appear so entrenched that the anticipated regime change following the rapid decapitation of the leadership did not occur. Yet Donald Trump had proclaimed: “What we did in Venezuela is, in my opinion, the perfect, the perfect scenario.” The Atlantic calls this attitude a “hostile corporate takeover of an entire country”. Now the US government expects Cuba to surrender. “I think I could do anything I want” with Cuba, Trump declared, now that the island is virtually cut off from energy supplies and its economy is in ruins. He is demanding the removal of Cuban President Diaz-Canel.

In the business world hostile corporate takeovers sometimes work, sometimes they fail. Similarly with Trump’s idea of swift government surrenders. In the case of Iran, he was misguided by the Wall Street playbook. Irresponsibly, he called on Iranians to overthrow the government before the bombing campaign started. Regime change in Iran has now been forgotten and Trump is agnostic about democracy. He is interested to get the oil price down and the stock market up.

Lessons from the past

The concept of regime change—replacing the top of the government to install one more agreeable to the US—is not new to US foreign policy. Proponents of regime change usually point to Japan and Germany as positive examples of successful democratization. Often, however, the goal is not, or at least not primarily, democratization, but rather the installation of a government that is ideologically close to the US or amenable to them. But the “Trump Corollary”, as explicitly stated in the National Security Strategy to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, is not new either. In reality, it was already the Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush doctrine.

Both Trump’s idea of regime change and his rigorously pursued territorial ambitions (Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal) are reminiscent of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, particularly the version of this doctrine expanded by President Roosevelt in 1904. This doctrine legitimized American interventions in Latin America. At the beginning of the 20th century, the US intervened in numerous Latin American countries in ‘its backyard’, using military and intelligence means: in Colombia, to support Panamanian separatists in controlling the Panama Canal; repeatedly in the Dominican Republic; they occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909 and intervened there repeatedly afterward; in Nicaragua during the so-called ‘Banana War’, to protect the interests of the US company United Fruit; in Mexico, as well as in Haiti and Honduras.

The New York Times recently suggested that Trump’s current enthusiasm for regime change is most comparable to that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his two terms in office from 1953 to 1961, the once coldly calculating general allowed himself to be seduced into a downward spiral from one coup to the next. In 1953, the US succeeded in overthrowing the elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with Operation Ajax. Mossadegh wanted to nationalize the British-owned oil industry. The coup succeeded with CIA support. The US installed the Shah as its puppet. He ruled with absolute power until the so-called Iranian Revolution and the dictatorship of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. After the successful overthrow of the government in Iran, Eisenhower decided to intervene in Guatemala. The elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who initiated far-reaching land reform laws, was overthrown in a coup d’état in 1954 and replaced by the pro-American colonel, Castillo Armas.

During this period, the US government also formulated the so-called domino theory, which aimed to prevent governments, particularly in Asia, from aligning themselves with the Soviet Union. The assumption was that if one domino fell, others would follow. It was during this time that the costly war in Korea ended in an armistice. Therefore, countries like Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Indonesia, and others were on Eisenhower’s domino list. However, the destabilization campaigns carried out by the CIA sometimes had the opposite effect. Governments in Indonesia and Syria emerged strengthened from the interventions. Eisenhower left Kennedy with the loss of American influence in Cuba. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, intended to overthrow Fidel Castro, was the starting point for the decades-long blockade of Cuba, which Trump is determined to end now through regime change.

The most dramatic example of failed regime change in recent history is undoubtedly the Iraq War, which began in 2003 under President George W. Bush. The stated goal was to remove Saddam Hussein from power and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. The war led to the overthrow of the regime. The United Nations and US teams found no weapons of mass destruction despite intensive on-site investigations. Attempts to establish an orderly state in Iraq failed. These experiences, and especially the disastrous outcome of two decades of military intervention in Afghanistan, discredited the concept of regime change.

What are the implications?

The most important lesson taught by efforts to affect externally forced regime change is that interventions often lead to crises that were ostensibly meant to be prevented or solved. The temptation was too great for Trump to miss the opportunity to depose the despised Maduro government.

Scholarly studies of the numerous attempted regime changes and democratization efforts reveal three key findings. First, simply removing the government from power (whether through assassination, as in the case of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or now in Iran, or through kidnapping as in Venezuela) is insufficient, as such actions often lead to chaos, state collapse, or even civil war. Thus, it will be interesting to watch further developments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.

A second lesson from empirical studies of regime change is that democratization is more likely to succeed if democratic experience already existed in the country. However, this is often not the case.

Finally, if the real goal is democratization (and not just to secure spheres of influence or oil supplies etc.), it is far more promising not only to hold elections (as in Afghanistan, for example), but to renounce violence and initiate a long-term program with development aid and support for civil society.

Whether the US government will be impressed by these findings, or even acknowledge them, is doubtful. Currently, the American president is euphoric, despite the strong reaction from the Iranian government which he, surprisingly, did not expect. His promises to end the senseless wars and not start any new ones, however, seem to have been forgotten.

Related articles:
The US: Good at Starting but Bad at Ending Wars
Failure of US–Iran Talks Was All Too Predictable — But Turning to Military Strikes Creates Dangerous Unknowns
The ‘Donroe Doctrine’
The Return of the Ugly American

Herbert Wulf is a Professor of International Relations and former Director of the Bonn International Center for Conflict Studies (BICC). He is presently a Senior Fellow at BICC, an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg/Essen, Germany, and a Research Affiliate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand. He serves on the Scientific Council of SIPRI.

This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished from the original with their permission.

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Credit: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Apr 6 2026 (IPS)

Bangladesh’s first credible election in nearly two decades delivered a landslide win for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its leader Tarique Rahman, son of a former prime minister, just back from 17 years of self-imposed exile.

The election was made possible by a Generation Z-led uprising that security forces sought to repress by killing at least 1,400 people. The protest that began when young people rose up against a job quota system that functioned as a tool of patronage grew into a movement that brought down a government. Many protesters wanted something beyond the ousting of an authoritarian government, calling for old politics to be swept aside and young people to have a genuine say in government. What’s resulted falls short of that, and Bangladesh’s new government should be aware that unless it delivers genuine change, protests could rise again.

The uprising

The 2024 protests that toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began when Bangladesh’s High Court reinstated a 30 per cent quota for descendants of 1971 independence war veterans, leaving less than half of public sector jobs open to recruitment based on merit. In a country with acute youth unemployment, frustrated young people rejected this system as a vehicle for Awami League patronage. Coordinated by the Students Against Discrimination network, the movement spread nationwide through road and railway blockades.

The government’s response turned a policy dispute into a political crisis. Members of the Awami League’s student wing attacked protesters. Authorities imposed a nationwide curfew with a shoot-on-sight order, shut down the internet and directed security forces to fire lethal weapons into crowds. But the repression backfired. People used their phones to document every incident, and footage circulated widely after internet access was partly restored, directly undermining the government’s narrative that cast protesters as violent agitators. The killing of student coordinator Abu Sayed, filmed as he stood unarmed with arms outstretched before police opened fire, became the uprising’s defining image.

On 5 August 2024, facing a mass march on her residence, Hasina fled to India on an army helicopter. As CIVICUS’s 2026 State of Civil Society Report sets out, Bangladesh’s Gen Z-led uprising went on to inspire subsequent protests in Indonesia, Nepal and beyond.

Reforms in the balance

Three days after Hasina fled, Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as Chief Adviser of an interim government. This was a victory for the student movement, which had made clear it would not accept a military-backed administration. His government established reform commissions covering the constitution, corruption, judiciary, police and public administration, and negotiated the July National Charter with political parties: 84 proposals designed to reduce the concentration of power in the prime minister’s office and make it structurally harder for any future government to capture the state the way Hasina had. Most parties signed it in October 2025.

But the path to the election was neither clean nor consensual. The International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic judicial body reinstated by the interim government, convicted Hasina in absentia for crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death. In May 2025, the interim government banned the Awami League under anti-terrorism legislation. International observers warned that excluding the country’s largest party risked disenfranchising millions and undermining the election’s democratic credibility.

The election timing was also bitterly contested: the BNP, eager to capitalise on its frontrunner status, pushed for an early date, while the newly formed National Citizen Party (NCP), founded by Gen Z protesters, wanted more time to organise and for institutional reforms to be locked in first. The BNP prevailed.

A dynasty returns

The BNP and its allies won 209 of 299 contested seats, securing a decisive two-thirds parliamentary majority. The right-wing Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami — whose 2013 ban the interim government lifted — emerged as the main opposition with close to 80 seats, its best-ever result. The NCP won just six of the 30 seats it contested.

The NCP’s poor showing had partly structural causes — formed in February 2025, it had barely a year to build an organisation with limited funds and no networks beyond urban centres — and was partly self-inflicted. A decision to ally with Jamaat-e-Islami as part of an 11-party coalition alienated many young voters who had hoped for genuinely new politics. Prominent NCP figures resigned in protest and stood as independents. NCP leader Nahid Islam, just 27 years old, did win a seat, and the party has pledged to rebuild in opposition.

The election itself was a genuine improvement on Bangladesh’s recent history. Turnout reached 60 per cent, up from 42 per cent in the fraud-ridden 2024 poll. Over 60 per cent of voters endorsed the July Charter in a referendum that was held alongside the election, giving the reform agenda a democratic mandate the new government will find difficult to ignore. Yet the vote would have been more legitimate had all parties been permitted to compete freely, and the campaign was not fully free of violence either: rights groups documented that at least 16 political activists were killed in the run-up to polling day.

Now the BNP inherits a state apparatus politicised over decades of one-party dominance and holds a two-thirds parliamentary majority with no meaningful check on its authority. Whether it will govern differently from those it replaced, or simply settle into the same logic of power, remains to be seen. The young people whose uprising made this election possible are watching. They have already brought down one government. The new one would do well to remember this.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Smoke rises in downtown Dhaka, the capital of Capital, during the July-August 2024 youth-led anti-government protests. Credit: UN Bangladesh/Mithu

By The Institute of Development Studies
BRIGHTON, UK, Apr 6 2026 (IPS)

Urgent steps need to be taken to rebuild the relationship between citizens and state to stem the decline of democracy globally. Experts point to inequality and political exclusion as two of the biggest drivers for democratic backsliding, with the exclusion of citizens from a role in policy and decision-making spaces leading to ‘hollow citizenship’.

A report, published by the Institute of Development Studies, comes as Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia and the US, have seen a rise in support for populist leaders on the left and right stoking division and weakening democratic safeguards, such as free and fair elections and free media.

This has led to key aspects of democracy declining during the last decade and now 74% of the
world’s population (6 billion) live in autocracies.

In response, the report authors call for an urgent rethink of democracy – which evidence shows delivers better social and economic outcomes than other regimes – to focus on people, power and inequality and less on institutions.

The experts say that past efforts to strengthen democracy globally focused too much on strengthening institutions, like legislature, judicial systems and electoral commissions and neglected the needs of people.

To sustain and strengthen democracies for the future, the reports call for urgent action to ensure people are included and engaged in democracy at local and national levels.

Shandana Khan Mohmand, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, said: “After decades of unsuccessful efforts, and millions of dollars spent by Western powers to try and strengthen democracy globally, we need to learn the lessons about what does and doesn’t work.

“While supporting democratic institutions like electoral commissions, judicial systems and independent media are all critically important, evidence shows that the missing ingredient is people – and the extent that they can engage in democracy in meaningful ways. Whether in local council decisions about community parks or on a nation’s policy on green energy, or going to war, citizens need to be included and feel that they are heard in decision making.”

While there was optimism that digital technology, and particularly social media, would act as a force for democratisation and improving transparency and accountability, the research finds that has only led to limited gains.

Instead, the evidence shows that digital technology has been harnessed by regimes to support a descent into authoritarianism, using tactics like mass surveillance and internet shutdowns to suppress dissent and human rights.

The report also finds that the notable youth-led uprisings, such as in Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar attracted the headlines but that it is the more everyday acts of young people demonstrating inclusion and collective decision-making, rather than the mass protests, that are more significant for strengthening democracy and peace.

Marjoke Oosterom, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, said: “The scale of democratic backsliding globally serves as a warning to leaders of high, middle and low-income democracies alike. They ignore inequality and political exclusion at their peril as both are being exploited by anti-democratic politicians to stoke division, and lead people to question whether democracy works for them.

“The evidence shows that democracy is still the best model for an inclusive and fair society and urgent action is needed to halt the current democratic decline we are seeing in continents around the world.”

Despite the budget cuts by governments across Europe and the USA which significantly reduced initiatives designed to strengthen democracy globally, the report includes several recommendations for ways that states, policymakers and philanthropist funders can help strengthen democracy.

Those include fixing the relationship between states and citizens via greater inclusion of people in governance and politics, making space for diverse opinions and ideological positions, and public policy to address the needs of marginalised groups and reduce inequality, which in turn builds trust in democracy.

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Public Domain. Smoke rises above Tehran, Iran. Source: UN News

By Daniel D. Bradlow
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Apr 3 2026 (IPS)

By Easter 2026 it was still not clear when – or how – the war initiated by Israel and the US against Iran would end. But what was already clear was that it would harm Africa in a number of ways.

Firstly, it would adversely affect the global supply and prices of oil and gas, fertilisers and food. Secondly, local currencies would be affected. More than a month after the war had started a number of African currencies had begun to lose value against the US dollar.

Thirdly, interest rates stopped falling and further rate increases were highly likely. Fourth, there will be a decline in access to affordable foreign financing.

How should Africa respond?

African countries cannot avoid being harmed by the current Gulf war. Nevertheless, based on my work in international economic law and global economic governance, I think there are two lessons that, if followed, can help the continent emerge from the crisis in a better place.

First, governments and societies need to be pragmatic. Their first priority must be to do whatever they can to mitigate the impact of the war, particularly on their most vulnerable citizens. This will require governments to make trade-offs.

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They will have to reallocate budgets to at least maintain the level of imports necessary to meet the society’s basic needs. They will need to convince their creditors to help finance their necessary imports. They will also need to persuade them to be flexible enough that they leave governments with at least some policy space.

Second, states and societies need to identify opportunities within the crisis for actions that over the medium term can help them meet their financing, economic, environmental and social challenges. This requires collaboration between the state and its non-state stakeholders. Business, labour, religious groups, civil society organisations and international organisations all have something to contribute.

Oil price surge is hurting African economies: scholars in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa take stock

Action in the short run

The focus of Africa’s efforts in the short term must be on minimising the negative effects of the war and on managing the state’s external debts in the most sustainable and effective way.

This is easy to state, but hard to implement. This is particularly the case in the current international environment, in which it is not realistic to expect donor countries and other international sources of finance to be particularly generous.

African countries will need to convince their creditors to acknowledge that this crisis is beyond Africa’s control and that they should not compound the pain that’s being experienced. This will require, at a minimum, that the creditors agree to suspend debt payments for the next year.

Creditors have already accepted the principle that debt payments can be suspended when debt challenges arise from sources beyond the debtor’s control. Many of them have accepted clauses requiring such action under specific conditions in their most recent debt contracts. They also did this during COVID.

Second, African countries, which are already heavily indebted, should challenge their multilateral creditors to accept the consequences of being among the biggest creditors for the continent. This includes the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank. By custom these institutions are treated as preferred creditors.

This means that they get paid before all other creditors. Instead of participating in any debt restructurings, they also make new loans to the debtor in crisis. This shifts the debt restructuring burden onto the debtor’s other creditors. It also increases the total amount owed to the multilaterals.

This cannot continue. These institutions need to be more creative in providing Africa to financing. This should include:

• Using their financial resources to guarantee the financial transactions of African countries so that they can reduce their borrowing costs and attract new equity investments.
• More generously supporting innovative debt for development swaps. These involve creditors agreeing with African sovereign debtors to convert a portion of the existing debts into financing for specific local projects, for example in health or education.
• Helping African governments convert their foreign exchange denominated debts into local currency debts at affordable interest rates.

Third, governments should work with the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions to use these institutions more effectively to finance African development. For example:

• They should require the institutions to only undertake transactions that are consistent with their development mandates. This means no more opaque transactions like the recent one that the African Finance Corporation concluded with Senegal.
• African governments should take the necessary action to activate the African Financial Stability Mechanism that they agreed to establish last year. This would create a useful financial safety net for the continent.

Fourth, African governments must build on the efforts they began last year to become a more effective advocate for African development financing interests at the international level. Among these efforts was the initiative by African ministers of finance to develop common African positions on sovereign debt restructurings. Another was South Africa’s launch of the African Expert Panel that proposed a number of initiatives on African debt and development financing.

In the medium term

African countries should advocate for the IMF to review its governance arrangements so that it becomes more accountable and responsive to developing countries, including African states and societies.

They should also advocate for the IMF to more use its existing resources, including its gold reserves, more creatively to support Africa.

Second, Africa should call for a debate on the preferred creditor status of multilateral financial institutions. This has become particularly relevant because the members of the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions are claiming that, like all other multilateral financial institutions, they are entitled to this status.

It is not clear that there are good arguments for excluding these institutions from preferred creditor status while protecting the position of the legacy institutions. This suggests that there is a need for some general principles that help determine which institutions should be treated as preferred creditors. These should be acceptable to all multilateral financial institutions and other market participants.

Third, African societies must make every effort to demonstrate that they are taking control of their own development. They should demand that their governments and all other actors in African development finance behave responsibly in regard to the financial, economic, environmental and social aspects of these transactions.

Another medium-term objective should be to limit the illicit financial flows that are so often associated with international trade and investment. This goal would be advanced by the successful conclusion of the current efforts to agree on a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

Prof Daniel D. Bradlow, Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, was Senior Non-Resident Fellow, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University and Professor Emeritus, American University Washington College of Law

Source: Conversation Africa

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On 27 October, Omer, a Community Development Committee member, supports health workers at the UNICEF-supported mobile clinic in Al Jadab village in Atbara, River Nile State. Through this initiative, UNICEF is restoring lifesaving healthcare services, such as nutrition, immunization, antenatal and postnatal services, medical consultations, and essential medicines, closer to vulnerable communities. Credit: UNICEF/Mohamed Dawod

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 2 2026 (IPS)

Global human migration is at record-high levels, as the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that roughly 1 in 8 people—about one billion individuals—are on the move. Many of these migrants and refugees face harsh living conditions and heightened challenges, such as poverty, insecurity, and limited access to basic services. With the number of international migrants having doubled since 1990, new findings from WHO call for expanding health systems to meet the growing scale of needs.

“Refugees and migrants are not just recipients of care, they are also health workers, caregivers and community leaders,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO. “Health systems are only truly universal when they serve everyone. “Like anyone else, refugees and migrants need uninterrupted, affordable, and equitable access to health services wherever they are.”

WHO estimates that there are approximately 304 million international migrants worldwide, including 170 million migrant workers. Roughly 117 million of those are persons who have been forcibly displaced, 49 million are children, and 2.3 million have been born as refugees.

More than 71 percent of the world’s international migrants find refuge in low to middle-income countries, which often face the most severe resource constraints and protection challenges. Marginalized groups are disproportionately affected: women and girls are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence and often lack access to related services; unaccompanied children face heightened risks of exploitation, abuse, and neglect; and persons with disabilities face elevated barriers to accessibility and increased exposure to discrimination.

Refugees and migrants have been found to experience greater exposure to health risks, in part driven by conditions that restrict movement and access to care, as well as persistent discrimination and language and cultural barriers. These challenges are exacerbated by ongoing conflict and climate-related disasters, leaving millions around the world increasingly vulnerable to infectious and chronic diseases, mental health issues, and dangerous living and working conditions.

“We cannot talk about refugee and migrant health without also addressing emergencies,” said Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, WHO’s executive director for health emergencies. “Whether it’s a conflict, a climate-related crisis, or an epidemic that forces movement, these crises expose the fragility of health systems and magnify the vulnerabilities of all those already at risk.”

On March 26, WHO launched its World Report on Promoting the Health of Refugees and Migrants: Monitoring Progress on the WHO Global Action Plan, establishing what it describes as the first global baseline for tracking progress toward inclusive, migrant-responsive health systems. Based on data from more than 93 Member States, the report highlights both a growing shift in national responses to migrant and refugee health needs and the persistent structural gaps that continue to hinder progress toward equitable access.

WHO found that out of the member states surveyed, only 42 percent reported having emergency preparedness and disaster reduction or response programs in place for migrant or refugee communities. Just 40 percent indicated that they provide training for health workers in culturally responsive care, while only 37 percent reported having systems to collect, monitor, and analyze migration-related health data—information that is rarely disseminated enough to support a more coordinated global response.

Discrimination remains widespread in low- and middle-income countries that host large numbers of refugees and migrants, with misinformation and disinformation continuing to fuel negative perceptions of these communities. Only 30 percent of surveyed countries reported having communication campaigns in place to counter these misconceptions and discriminatory language.

Anti-migrant sentiment remains particularly pronounced, with internally displaced persons, migrant workers, international students, and migrants under irregular circumstances being far less likely to access health services. Additionally, refugees and migrants are largely unrepresented in governance and decision-making processes that shape their access to health rights in most surveyed countries.

“The phenomena of displacement is unfortunately happening more frequently in countries with fragile systems, fragile economies and limited domestic resources,” said Dr Santino Severoni, head of WHO’s Special Initiative on Health and Migration and lead author of the report. “There is almost no mention of irregular migrants in those emergency plans and response or in disease risk reductions, there is no systematic approach in assessing the system to see how their system is really functioning, how efficient and effective it is. This is really a call for action to keep the promise of sharing a bit of responsibility in managing those emergencies.”

Over the past year, international support for refugee health has seen considerable declines. Figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show that their 2025 response plan has secured only 23 percent of its USD 10.6 billion goal. The agency projects that this could cause over 12.8 million displaced persons to lose access to lifesaving health interventions this year.

Global responses have been polarizing. Some countries have adopted inclusive policies that support migrant communities—such as Chile— which has supplied municipal health councils for migrants and refugees with community representatives. Other countries, such as the United States and Canada, have cut health insurance coverage for undocumented migrants, forcing them to pay out of pocket for lifesaving care and increasing protection risks.

Through the report, WHO called for greater inclusion of refugee and migrant voices in decision-making processes, as well as improved coordination between governments. With a smoother flow of data between Member States, WHO will be able to more effectively shape health, employment, housing, and protection services.

WHO emphasized that responses should be specifically tailored to the needs of different migrant subgroups, while remaining committed to countering misinformation and discrimination through “evidence-based action.” Investment in refugee and migrant health systems has been found to deliver significant returns, fostering improved social and economic cohesion, revitalizing fragile health systems, and boosting global security, all while reducing long-term costs by promoting these communities to contribute back to society.

“The health of refugees and migrants is not a marginal concern: it is a defining issue of our time,” said Severoni. “By acting now, countries can ensure that refugees and migrants are not left behind, and that health systems are stronger, fairer and more prepared for the future.”

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CIVICUS discusses Italy’s restrictive immigration policies with Eleonora Celoria, a researcher at FIERI (Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione), a research centre on migration, and a member of the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration (ASGI), an Italian legal organisation that defends migrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights through advocacy, public awareness and strategic litigation.

Eleonora Celoria

What are the main objectives of the new migration bill?

The bill introduces a 30-day naval blockade mechanism, extendable to six months, for ships deemed to pose a ‘serious threat to public order or national security’, including on the grounds of ‘exceptional migratory pressure’. It goes beyond European Union (EU) frameworks and is designed to restrict civil society organisations conducting search and rescue operations.

The blockade is really a prohibition on entering Italian waters, and ships that violate it would face fines of up to €50,000 (approx. US$ 57,000), with repeat offenders facing confiscation. Since civil society rescue vessels are the only ships making multiple trips in and out of Italian waters, they are the primary target. This is not simply a border management tool; it’s a deliberate escalation of state control over maritime arrivals.

More significantly, the bill would make the Italy-Albania protocol permanent: migrants intercepted at sea would be transported directly to Italian-run processing centres in Albania, bypassing Italian mainland ports entirely. Their asylum claims would be determined outside Italy’s jurisdiction. Because they never reach Italian soil, they wouldn’t access Italian legal protections or independent judicial review. The government is determined to use this mechanism. Albanian facilities held only 10 to 15 people due to adverse court rulings, but the government has recently ramped up transfers to take the number to around 80.

How does the bill change asylum and border management practices?

The bill focuses on criminalisation, deportations and removals rather than asylum procedures. It introduces stricter rules for immigration detention centres (Centri di Permanenza per i Rimpatri, CPRs), expands expulsion grounds to include minor criminal convictions and ramps up criminal penalties for people facing expulsion. This effectively criminalises irregular status itself.

Critically, the bill eliminates special protection, a form of national protection that Italian courts have frequently recognised for people who don’t meet narrow refugee criteria but face serious risks if they are returned. This has been one of the few remaining meaningful pathways to legal status. Stricter eligibility criteria would reduce judicial discretion, trapping more people in legal irregularity.

Finally, the bill implements the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a package of EU laws overhauling asylum and border procedures across the bloc, which member states must transpose by 12 June. It does so through legislative delegation, giving the government wide discretion to enact implementing measures by decree. Italy’s approach is the most restrictive possible. The Albania externalisation model is the primary mechanism, prioritising rapid removal over thorough examination. Changes to asylum procedures will be determined through executive action, with limited parliamentary scrutiny.

What is remigration, and why does it concern civil society?

Remigration is a white supremacist concept that calls for the forced removal of immigrants, refugees and their descendants, including legal residents and naturalised citizens, on grounds of ethnicity, race or perceived failure to ‘assimilate’. It targets people for who they are, not what they have done, violating the non-discrimination principle that underpins human rights law and the rule of law.

What makes this dangerous is that remigration has moved from marginal to mainstream political discourse. A far-right petition on remigration has recently gathered enough signatures to force a parliamentary debate. When such concepts gain mainstream legitimacy, they push other parties towards increasingly restrictive policies. Italy’s current bills move precisely in that direction.

From a legal perspective, remigration violates international human rights conventions and Italy’s constitution, which guarantees non-discrimination and solidarity. A policy based on ethnic or racial identity would also be incompatible with Italy’s international obligations.

Where do these measures conflict with international law?

The measures create serious tensions with several binding legal instruments: the 1951 Geneva Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and EU primary law including the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Expanded administrative detention in Italy and Albania risks being arbitrary where the legal basis is insufficiently precise or subject to inadequate judicial review. Documented conditions in Italian CPRs and foreseeable conditions in Albanian centres expose people to inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 3 of the ECHR. The externalisation model creates a direct risk of violating the non-refoulement principle, the absolute prohibition on returning people to places where they face persecution.

The government will argue these measures align with the EU Pact. But alignment with the pact does not guarantee compatibility with the ECHR or the Geneva Convention. ASGI will respond with litigation, through individual cases and strategic cases targeting CPR detention and the Italy-Albania deal, and documentation of the human costs of these policies.

What risks do these policies pose for migrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights?

Under the proposed legislation, Italy would intercept boats and transfer rescued migrants to extraterritorial centres without assessing their health status, protection needs or vulnerabilities. Victims of persecution, torture and trafficking may never get to present their claims or be identified as needing protection.

The bill criminalises irregular migrants by allowing both administrative detention in CPRs and criminal imprisonment in prisons, a dual-track approach that multiplies the risk of fundamental rights violations and exposure to degrading conditions. Detention in existing CPRs is already documented as dangerous. Conditions in the Albanian centres, with minimal oversight and no independent monitoring, would predictably be worse.

The result is a system designed to process people quickly rather than accurately. Trafficking victims, torture survivors and people with severe mental health conditions — people who most need careful assessment and legal support — are unlikely to be identified and protected. Compressed timelines and limited access to lawyers amount to a serious restriction on the right to effective judicial protection.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Migration: Cruelty as policy CIVICUS | 2026 State of Civil Society Report
Greece: ‘New migration and asylum policies challenge the basic principles of refugee protection and the European legal order’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Minos Mouzourakis 26.Sep.2025
Italy: ‘No migration policy should be based on fear and punishment’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Valeria Carlini 17.Nov.2024

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CIVICUS discusses the presidential election in the Republic of the Congo with Ivan Kibangou Ngoy, executive director of Global Participe, a civil society action-research organisation focused on democratic governance based in Pointe-Noire.

Ivan Kibangou Ngoy

How can the 94.8 per cent result be explained?

The outcome of this election was predictable from the outset, and for one fundamental reason: the legal framework gives free rein to electoral fraud. The electoral law lacks the necessary safeguards to prevent manipulation. The ruling party has systematically rigged the electoral process, excluding its opponents and independent civil society from any meaningful participation.

Accreditation for observers was refused to independent civil society organisations (CSOs), evidence of a total lack of transparency. Without independent observers, there’s no external oversight of the conduct of the vote or the counting of votes.

The result was not the outcome of electoral competition; it was the logical result of a system designed to guarantee precisely this outcome. When the legal framework allows for fraud, the opposition cannot campaign, observers are excluded and the government controls all administrative mechanisms, including the electoral administration, the result becomes inevitable. This is not an anomaly but the product of a system designed to produce it and to give it the appearance of democratic legitimacy. So the result was already decided even before polling stations opened.

How was competition restricted?

Opposition parties and independent CSOs were not allowed to organise public meetings or campaign openly among voters. They were denied access to public media, preventing them communicating with people.

The country still operates under a prior authorisation regime: the government must approve all public political activity. This system creates a fundamental imbalance: the ruling party can organise its rallies freely, while the opposition is blocked at every turn. There is an urgent need to move to a simple notification system, in which CSOs and parties would inform the authorities of their activities without needing their consent. Without this change, the opposition has no legal mechanism to participate fairly in an election.

The imprisonment and exile of major opposition figures send a clear message: challenging Sassou Nguesso’s regime is criminalised. Two of the country’s best-known opposition figures have been in prison for nearly a decade. When opponents cannot stand for election, campaign or move about freely, the result is predetermined both by fraud and the physical elimination of alternatives. The election is merely an administrative charade designed to legitimise the retention of power. It’s not a genuine choice but a demonstration of state power over a population reduced to silence.

Why is the internet cut off during elections?

Since the advent of social media, every election has been accompanied by an internet blackout, a deliberate measure the authorities take to control the information circulating during the vote. Internet shutdowns directly reinforce the system of electoral fraud by preventing the spread of information on fraud, irregularities or violations of voters’ rights. Without the internet, people cannot share photos or videos from polling stations, observers cannot report anomalies in real time and citizen movements cannot coordinate monitoring efforts.

The internet blackout effectively transforms the country into an information-controlled zone where only government messages can circulate. This reveals that the regime understands the power of social media as a tool for accountability and mobilisation. It’s an implicit acknowledgement that, without control over information, the regime could not maintain its official narrative. This systematic practice ultimately reveals the fragility of the regime’s legitimacy.

How has civil society mobilised despite restrictions?

Despite systematic restrictions, civil society organised itself by holding press conferences and workshops in private spaces, where the authorities could not intervene directly. These meetings enabled civil society to coordinate strategies and strengthen cohesion between organisations, even with a limited number of participants. Press conferences enabled direct engagement with the media despite restrictions on access to public media. Civil society also used social media to document rights violations, mobilise people and maintain a public conversation on electoral issues.

However, these strategies reveal the limits of resistance in a heavily controlled environment. Meetings in private spaces reach only a limited audience and social media can be shut down at any moment, as happened on election day. We must continue mapping independent CSOs to identify and connect all those working outside the regime’s control. We must also train CSO leaders in techniques for raising awareness and mobilising people.

People must understand the nature of the regime governing Congo-Brazzaville. The current regime is embodied by the Congolese Labour Party, a former Soviet-style party-state ousted from power at the ballot box in 1992, in the only truly free and transparent election the country has ever held. The party returned to power by force of arms after overthrowing the democratically elected government. Understanding this history is crucial: it proves that democratic change is possible. When people understand the mechanisms of power seizure and refuse to accept them, the regime loses its legitimacy even if it retains formal control of the state.

What’s the future for democracy in Congo after 42 years of rule?

Four decades under the same regime amount to the systematic denial of democratic change, of citizens’ fundamental right to choose a different government through the ballot box. Sassou Nguesso’s fifth term consolidates an institutional framework designed to ensure no one else ever comes to power through democratic means.

This framework operates through the systematic contradiction between constitutional promises and practice. The constitution proclaims a multi-party system, but a law recognises only those parties that pledge allegiance to the ruling power. The constitution creates the post of leader of the opposition, but this leader is the head of a party affiliated with the ruling power. The constitution establishes an advisory council of associations, but this institution is attached to the office of the head of state to muzzle civil society. The country is run like a barracks.

We must expose and discredit this regime internationally, by publicly denouncing its supporters, notably the French government and oil multinationals. Independent civil society must step up awareness-raising campaigns, both in person and online. The international community must exert sustained pressure, including diplomatic pressure, sanctions and support for organisations in exile. Without this combination of internal action and international pressure, democratic change will remain impossible. But it is possible. It happened in 1992, and it can happen again.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Democracy: an enduring aspiration CIVICUS | 2026 State of Civil Society Report
‘Gabon remains at a crossroads between democratic change and authoritarian continuity’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Sentiment Ondo 21.Nov.2025
‘Media and social networks are battlegrounds where rumours and disinformation circulate widely’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Kaberu Tairu 11.Oct.2025

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The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, carrying around a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas and fertilizers.

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Mar 31 2026 (IPS)

Trump’s Iran war has left the Gulf shattered: US bases turned into targets, economies battered, and the “oasis” myth destroyed. Gulf rulers now confront a harsh reckoning over their reliance on Washington and the uncertain search for a new, fragile security order.

As Trump assembled major US naval and air assets in the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and others quietly urged Washington to avoid a full-scale assault on Iran, fearing a direct blowback on their territory and energy infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the US–Israeli air campaign began on February 28, 2026, without a clearly defined and publicly articulated political endgame beyond “crippling” Iran’s capabilities. This disconnect between military escalation and strategic purpose now lies at the core of Gulf leaders’ anger and sense of betrayal toward Washington.

Trump’s Strategic Miscalculation

Trump’s decision to launch joint US–Israeli strikes on Iran has produced far higher strategic costs than his administration appears to have anticipated, from energy shock and disrupted shipping to heightened regional fragmentation and anti-American sentiment.

Even if Iranian capabilities are significantly degraded, the war has exposed vulnerabilities in US power projection, unsettled allies, and invited greater Russian and Chinese diplomatic activism in the Gulf. The long-term “price” for Washington will be measured less in battlefield metrics than in diminished trust and leverage among its traditional Arab partners.

US Bases Turned to Liabilities

From a Gulf perspective, US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE were meant to deter Iran and guarantee regime security; instead, they became priority targets once the war began. Iran explicitly framed its strikes on these facilities as retaliation against Washington, but their location in densely populated and economically vital areas meant that nearby civilian infrastructure also suffered severe damage.

This experience is reinforcing a view in Gulf capitals that foreign basing arrangements draw fire without delivering the reliable protection they assumed for decades.

A Nightmare Realized

Gulf leaders long warned that a war with Iran would shatter their security and economies, a nightmare that has now materialized as Iranian missiles and drones hit oil facilities, ports, power plants, and cities across the region. They blame Washington for launching the campaign and Israel for pressing to “neutralize” Iran regardless of collateral damage in neighboring Arab states.

The sense in Gulf capitals is that their caution was dismissed, while they have paid a disproportionate price in physical destruction, economic setback, disrupted exports, and heightened domestic anxiety.

Shattered Oasis Narrative

The image of Gulf hubs like Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh as insulated “oases” open to business, tourism, and investment has been badly damaged by missile alerts, strikes on ports and airports, and the closure of key sea lanes.

Restoring confidence will require visible reconstruction, enhanced civil defense, improved air and missile defenses, and credible diplomacy that lowers the perceived risk of another sudden war. Investors and tourists will demand proof that the region can manage Iran-related tensions, not just high-end events and mega-projects.

Trump’s Misreading of Iranian Escalation

Trump publicly argued that overwhelming force would quickly coerce Iran and usher in regime change while keeping fighting “over there,” yet he appears not to have anticipated the breadth of Iranian retaliation against neighboring Gulf states or a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The IRGC’s effective shutdown of the strait, including attacks and threats against commercial shipping, has produced global energy shocks and exposed the fragility of US planning assumptions. For Gulf leaders, this underscores how inadequate Washington’s war planning was in accounting for second- and third-order consequences.

Calculated Decision Not to Retaliate

Despite heavy damage, Gulf rulers have so far avoided direct retaliation against Iran, calculating that further escalation would expose their cities and infrastructure to even more punishing strikes. Publicly, they stress restraint and international law, but privately, officials acknowledge their enduring geographic reality: they must coexist with a powerful and proximate Iran long after this US-led campaign ends.

By holding their fire, they hope to preserve space for postwar de-escalation and avoid being locked into a permanent state of open conflict.

Recasting Security Arrangements with Washington

Given their limited strategic alternatives, Gulf monarchies are unlikely to sever ties with Washington but will seek more conditional, transactional security arrangements. They are pressing for clearer US commitments on defense of their territory, better integration of regional missile defenses, and greater say over decisions that could trigger Iranian retaliation.

At the same time, they will hedge by deepening ties with China, Russia, Europe, and Asian energy importers, thereby reducing exclusive reliance on the US while keeping the American security umbrella in place.

Gulf Options to Prevent Future Conflagration

To prevent a repeat, Gulf states are also exploring limited de-escalation channels with Tehran, tighter regional crisis hotlines, and revived maritime security arrangements that include non-Western actors such as China and India. They may push for new rules of engagement around energy infrastructure and shipping lanes, seeking informal understandings that keep these off-limits even in crises.

Internally, they are reassessing missile defense, hardening critical facilities, and considering more diversified export routes that reduce dependence on Hormuz. None of these options are fully reassuring, but together they offer partial risk reduction.

Prospects for Normalization with Iran

Speculation about full normalization, including a non-belligerency pact between Iran and Gulf states, builds on prewar trends of cautious dialogue and economic engagement. Whether this is truly “in the cards” depends on war outcomes, Iran’s internal politics, and Gulf threat perceptions: if Tehran’s regime survives but remains hostile, Gulf states will likely revert to hedging—combining deterrence, limited engagement, and outreach to outside powers.

A more pragmatic Iranian leadership could make structured security arrangements and phased confidence-building measures more plausible over time.

No Return to Status Quo Ante

The Gulf States will not return to the prewar status quo; instead, they are likely to pursue a more diversified security architecture, combining a thinner US shield with expanded ties to China, Russia, and Asian importers. This shift will gradually dilute Washington’s centrality in Gulf security, complicating US force posture and Israel’s assumption of automatic Arab backing against Iran.

For Israel, a more cautious, risk-averse Gulf may limit overt strategic alignment, while for the US, enduring mistrust will make coalition-building for future crises far more difficult.

Trump’s Iran adventure is not an isolated blunder but the latest, and perhaps most explosive, expression of his assault on an already fragile global order. By discarding restraint, sidelining allies, and weaponizing American power for short-term political gain, he has accelerated the erosion of US credibility, fractured Western alliances, and opened new strategic space for Russia and China. The Gulf States are simply the newest casualties of this disorder: their cities struck, economies shaken, and security assumptions shattered.

Whatever emerges from this war, it will not be a restored status quo, but a more fragmented, volatile Middle East in which Israel and the United States confront a diminished margin for error and a far narrower circle of willing, trusting partners.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

alon@alonben-meir.com

IPS UN Bureau

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While media coverage of Iran’s restrictions on passage through the Hormuz Straits focuses on fuel prices, partial closure is also disrupting crucial fertiliser and other supplies, risking catastrophe for billions worldwide.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Hormuz is not just a chokepoint on a shipping lane for oil and gas; it has strategic implications for fertiliser, helium, and other energy-intensive exports as well as for food and other imports to the region.

Higher energy costs affect most transportation and farming requirements, such as tilling and harvesting, as well as fertiliser supplies.

Wars, especially protracted ones, have lasting effects, including for agrifood systems. Without earlier investments, output elsewhere cannot be easily increased.

Alternative fertiliser supply sources are not readily available, especially as agro-ecological options have rarely been seriously pursued despite their proven viability.

As with renewable energy generation to reduce the need for petroleum imports, it is unclear whether the looming food crisis will accelerate the needed and feasible agro-ecological transition for enhanced food security.

Disrupted food supplies
Shipping delays and port congestion disrupt food supplies, trade and availability.

K Kuhaneetha Bai

Many states have recently tried to improve their food security, expanding strategic reserves, investing in food agriculture and alternative supply routes.

Such measures have improved resilience but cannot address a prolonged blockade of the Persian Gulf. About 70% of the food for Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Gulf emirates passes through Hormuz.

Replacing disrupted food imports for about 100 million people would require moving almost 100 million kilograms (kg) of food into the region daily by other means.

Supplying food to the Gulf region under blockade would require an unprecedented operation, possibly through contested airspace.

In 2024, the UN World Food Programme delivered about 7 million kg of food daily to 81 million people in 71 countries.

Weather-driven food shortages and price spikes triggered political instability in 2008 and 2010-11. With food systems worldwide increasingly vulnerable to climate shocks, food insecurity threatens regimes everywhere.

Fertilisers
Farmers worldwide need stable supplies of fertilisers and fuel.

The Iran war threatens to disrupt these supplies, so crucial to agricultural production. Staple crops like wheat, rice and maize rely heavily on fertilisers.

Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain all ship petroleum products through Hormuz, including a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG).

As LNG is key to producing many fertilisers, Gulf exports have become more significant, especially after the war cut Ukraine’s exports, and China and Russia reduced theirs as well.

In 2024, the Middle East accounted for almost 30% of major fertiliser exports, including nitrogen, phosphate and potash.

The Gulf alone exported 23% of the world’s ammonia and 34% of its urea, while 30-40% of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser exports pass through Hormuz!

In mid-2025, Kpler estimated that a Hormuz closure could reduce fertiliser supplies by 33%, with sulphur-based ones falling by 44% and urea by 30%.

Reduced nitrogen-based fertiliser exports would hurt major food exporters such as Brazil, the US, Thailand, and India, all heavily reliant on fertiliser imports. However, the impact of shortages may be delayed until imported stocks run out.

As the war drags on, farmers may cut fertiliser use by planting less or switching to crops requiring less. Poorer harvests would, in turn, adversely affect later investment, planting and fertiliser use.

Who suffers most?
The economic consequences of the unprovoked US-Israeli assault on Iran and Tehran’s responses are spreading fast and catastrophically, especially for the most vulnerable.

Iran’s new leadership mistrusts Washington and will keep Hormuz closed – choking fuel, food, and fertiliser flows through it – to secure the guarantees it needs to reduce its vulnerability.

As attacks on Iran continued, Tehran stepped up targeted attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf kingdoms hosting US military facilities. US-led efforts have provided little relief to its allies.

The worldwide impact is uneven, with the poorest taking the brunt. Asia and Africa have been hard hit by heavy reliance on oil, gas, and fertiliser imports.

Rich nations’ aid cuts to increase military spending have worsened poverty and hunger for millions, many of whom are also victims of war and aggression.

Unlike the rich, many migrant workers in the Gulf who cannot leave will struggle to make ends meet and send money home to their families.

And as the world’s attention has turned to the Gulf, Israel has worsened conditions in Gaza while taking over southern Lebanon and increasing Yemen’s pain.

Concerned about retribution in November’s mid-term elections, the White House is keen on a ceasefire.

But it has not offered terms acceptable to Iran, which remains suspicious of the US commitment to its own promises, let alone the rule of law.

Hence, the Iranian leadership is unlikely to agree to a ceasefire without credible guarantees for its future security from renewed Israeli and US aggression.

The Iran war has highlighted, yet again, the collateral damage of war and the food system’s vulnerability. Meanwhile, the suffering of the more vulnerable is ignored by the greater powers, who pay little heed to their plight.

IPS UN Bureau

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Vivian van de Perre, Deputy Special Representative for Protection and Operations in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and Interim Head of MONUSCO, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 2026 (IPS)

In the month following the reopening of the Burundi-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border, the humanitarian crisis in the DRC has deteriorated considerably, recently marked by an influx of Congolese refugees returning home, where they face overcrowded conditions and a severe shortage of essential services. This comes in the midst of escalating clashes between rebel groups AFC and M23, and forces affiliated with the Kinshasa government, with drone strikes causing widespread destruction and pushing violence closer to Burundi’s borders, where conditions are most dire.

Vivian van de Perre, Deputy Special Representative for Protection and Operations with the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), described the current humanitarian situation as “extremely volatile”. During a press stakeout on March 26, she highlighted that the rapid spread of the conflict from North and South Kivu into Tshopo Province and toward Burundi’s borders is a major concern, warning that it increases the risk of a broader “regional conflagration.”

Van de Perre also warned that armed militants have been increasingly relying on the use of heavy weapons and drone strikes in densely populated urban areas, which have caused great damage to civilian infrastructure as well as serious risks to civilian safety, underscoring recent violent incidents at the Kisagani Bangoka International Airport and in Goma, the largest city in North Kivu. Additionally, she warned of M23’s growing presence in Goma, where the coalition has managed to gain influence, undermine state authority, and disrupt humanitarian aid deliveries.

Furthermore, the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office in the DRC (UNJHRO) has uncovered a considerable rise in human rights violations committed by armed groups. Since December 2025, approximately 173 cases of conflict-related sexual violence have been documented, affecting at least 111 victims, the majority of whom were women and girls.

Van de Perre described these findings as “only the tip of the iceberg,” and highlighted growing rates of exploitation, particularly along artisanal mining sites, where child labour is especially pronounced. Armed groups have also been alleged to hamper monitoring, investigation, and justice mechanisms, and subject human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society actors to intimidation and arbitrary detention.

This follows a sharp escalation of hostilities between the armed groups in December 2025, which forced hundreds of thousands of Congolese to flee to Burundi, most coming from Uvira in South Kivu Province and the surrounding areas. Figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) show that after M23’s withdrawal from Uvira in January and a relative return of stability, more than 33,000 refugees began returning home since the border’s reopening on February 23, with most crossing through the Kavimira border point. Many of these returnees already received little humanitarian assistance in Burundi due to chronic underfunding.

“Conditions in many areas of return in the DRC remain fragile, with acute humanitarian needs,” said Ali Mahamat, UNHCR Head of Sub-Office in Goma, DRC, on March 24 at a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. “Initial UNHCR assessments in Uvira and Fizi show families arriving with few belongings, in urgent need of shelter, basic household items, health care, and access to water and sanitation. Many returned to find their homes destroyed and belongings looted, leaving them in deep despair and unable to resume normal life without substantial support.”

According to the latest updates from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), roughly 60 percent of returnees are living in damaged shelters and over 30 percent face challenges accessing their land. Returnees face heightened risks of gender-based violence, forced recruitment into armed groups, extortion, and exploitation, with female-headed households disproportionately affected due to limited livelihood opportunities for women, which leave these communities entrenched in poverty and especially vulnerable.

Figures from UNHCR show that approximately 30 percent of returnees had been taking refuge in Burundi’s Busama displacement camp, where they faced significant levels of overcrowding and limited access to clean water, sanitation services, healthcare, and shelter. Currently, roughly 4,500 Congolese refugees remain stuck at transit points as they await being relocated to Busama. Additionally, Burundi continues to host over 109,000 Congolese refugees, with 67,000 of them in Busuma alone.

Additionally, internal displacement remains widespread in the DRC, with more than 6.4 million people currently displaced. IFRC estimates that over 5.2 million internally displaced Congolese are concentrated in North and South Kivu, as well as Ituri, 96 percent as a result of ongoing armed violence. According to van de Perre, over 26.6 million people, roughly a quarter of DRC’s population, are projected to face food insecurity this year.

Currently, UNHCR’s response plan to assist returnees, refugees, and displaced Congolese civilians is only 34 percent funded, seeking a total of USD 145 million. MONUSCO is currently on the frontlines providing protection services for nearly 3,000 civilians in Djaiba village. Through the mission, the UN has been able to support over 18,000 farmers in harvesting and transporting crops and has conducted 204 patrols. Van de Perre stressed that stronger governance and security enforcement are crucial in protecting vulnerable civilians, and disarmament and repatriation efforts must be conducted to resolve broader regional tensions.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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The Human Rights council, Geneva.
 
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk in an address to the Human Rights Council.

By Volker Turk
GENEVA, Mar 27 2026 (IPS)

More than three weeks after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, the conflict is spreading and intensifying in the region and beyond, with civilians bearing the brunt. Families across the region marked Eid and Nowruz under fire, in fear and uncertainty, and facing further hardship.

The situation is extremely dangerous and unpredictable, and has created chaos across the region, affecting Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and beyond.

Since the start of hostilities, Iran has launched large numbers of drones and missiles against military bases, residential areas and energy facilities across these Gulf States and Jordan. Strikes and interceptions have caused terrible harm to civilians, including dozens of deaths and injuries.

Meanwhile, ports, energy facilities, airports, water infrastructure, and diplomatic premises have suffered damage, disrupting essential services and increasing risks to all civilians.

Many of the strikes in this conflict raise serious concerns under international law, which prohibits attacks targeting civilians and their infrastructure, and attacks on military targets where harm to civilians is disproportionate.

I also need to underscore the grave ramifications of this conflict for a number of other countries in the broader region, including Iraq and Syria, as well as the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Recent missile strikes near nuclear sites in both Israel and Iran underscore the immense danger of further escalation. States are flirting with unmitigated catastrophe.

Civilians in Lebanon are caught up in a human rights and humanitarian disaster. Government figures detail more than one thousand people killed by Israeli military strikes in the past three weeks, including 79 women, 118 children and 40 medical workers. I am deeply concerned by attacks that have hit apartment buildings, killing entire families in some cases.

Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah continue to launch missiles and drones into Israel, also causing loss of life, damage to civilian infrastructure, and displacement.

Inside Iran, civilians seek shelter from airstrikes across all 31 provinces of the country. According to Iranian government figures, some 1,400 civilians have been killed and more than 20,000 injured.

There is a growing pattern of strikes affecting residential areas, civilian infrastructure, and other sites that are protected under international law. Housing, hospitals, schools, cultural sites, transport networks and energy infrastructure have all been hit.

As Iranians shelter from these strikes, they also face another wave of cruel state repression, including arbitrary arrests, executions, intimidation and censorship. The internet has been shut down for more than three weeks.

This conflict is also having very serious ramifications beyond the region.

The disruption by Iran of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is affecting global supply chains, with dire implications for some of the world’s poorest people.

Fossil fuels, medicine, food, and fertilizers are just some of the vital goods that are being held up at sea. This is disrupting global energy markets and supplies; and has the potential to create serious hunger and healthcare crises. The World Food Programme warns that almost 45 million more people could fall into acute hunger unless the conflict ends soon.

The effects are most destructive in lower-income countries, particularly across South Asia. Developing economies are in general less able to withstand price shocks.

Several States have already introduced energy-saving measures. Bangladesh, for example, has closed universities and introduced fuel rationing, while the Philippines has introduced a state of national energy emergency. The crisis could also reduce the flow of remittances from migrant workers that keep families and communities afloat.

There are ongoing attempts to mitigate the closure of the Strait by releasing oil reserves and easing sanctions. But they have not made a significant difference, and the wider consequences remain unpredictable.

Analysis by UNCTAD shows that insurance premiums and marine fuel costs are surging, increasing prices across the board and around the world.

The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for West Asia assesses that the conflict has already caused some $63 billion in economic losses across the Arab region.

Conflict can never be ordinary or standard. But this conflict has an unprecedented power to ensnare countries across borders and around the world. The complex dynamics could ignite further national, regional or global crises at any moment, with an appalling impact on civilians and people everywhere.

The only guaranteed way to prevent this is to end the conflict, and I urge all States, and particularly those with influence, to do everything in their power to achieve this.

Our deeply interconnected world requires that all countries recommit to full respect for international law, and the UN Charter.

We cannot go back to war as a tool of international relations.

When some powerful States are trying to weaken the multilateral system, we need the rest – the vast majority – to stand up for it. While the conflict continues, I call on all parties to ensure full respect for international humanitarian and human rights law.

Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure must end. If they are deliberate, such attacks may constitute war crimes.

I stand in solidarity with civilians across the region, who are crying out for peace.

IPS UN Bureau

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CIVICUS discusses Portugal’s presidential runoff election and the rise of the far-right Chega (Enough) party with Jonni Lopes, Executive Director of Academia Cidadã (Citizen Academy) and a Steering Committee member of the European Civic Forum, an organisation working on civic engagement, democratic participation and the protection of civic space at national, regional and international levels.

Jonni Lopes

Why did centre-right voters back a Socialist candidate?

Despite not agreeing with his politics, centre-right voters backed a Socialist candidate to build a firewall around the presidency, recognising that the office demands deliberation, predictability and respect for democratic rules, none of which Chega represents. Seguro’s campaign made this possible. He distanced himself from party politics, avoided turning the race into a debate about the Socialist Party and positioned himself as a stable figure capable of providing institutional continuity during a political crisis.

This was practical risk management, not ideology. The centre-right Social Democratic Party is pushing labour law changes that triggered a joint general strike in December, with over three million workers participating. With Chega already holding significant parliamentary power, voters feared that a far-right president would go further still, using veto powers not to check the government’s agenda, but to entrench it and block any legislation protecting workers’ rights.

This coalition shows that a clear boundary against the far right still exists, at least when it comes to leading the state. It’s a defensive pact: democrats can disagree on policy, but there’s a line when it comes to handing power to a reactionary force that threatens democratic institutions.

What does the result mean for Portugal and Europe?

For Portugal, this result is a temporary reprieve for democracy. Seguro won two-thirds of the second-round vote and over 3.5 million votes, the most ever cast for a presidential candidate in Portugal, despite storms that disrupted voting. This shows that, faced with a genuine far-right threat, Portuguese democracy can still mobilise broadly to defend itself.

But this wasn’t a clear victory against the far right. Ventura won one-third of the vote, strengthened his base and positioned himself as a serious contender for right-wing leadership. In just a few years, Chega has gone from a fringe party to parliament’s second largest.

This sends a mixed message to Europe: broad democratic coalitions can still prevent far-right candidates reaching the top office, but the far right is now mainstream, shapes political agendas and forces other parties to constantly define themselves in relation to it. This is the new normal. This matters particularly for the European Commission, as far-right movements are structural threats and the only response is to strengthen the rule of law and democratic institutions.

Where does Chega go from here?

Ventura lost the presidential election, but Chega has emerged stronger. Winning a third of the vote against a candidate backed by the entire democratic spectrum cements its position. Ventura can now claim to speak for a significant portion of the right, and his loss only strengthens that claim, as he can frame the firewall as evidence that the political system is rigged against him, feeding narratives of elite persecution. He will also use his parliamentary strength to extract concessions by supporting or blocking the government’s budget and pushing on immigration and security, winning enough policy gains to show he delivers for his voters.

Ventura has already said that support for stability ‘has limits’. If the government hits serious problems, such as a budget crisis or a political deadlock, Chega will position itself as the only force willing to break the impasse and ‘fix things’. He’s not treating the presidential loss as the end of his political project but as a stepping stone to bigger gains in future elections. His calculation is that electoral legitimacy can eventually become governmental power.

What does this mean for civic space and civil society?

Portugal’s civic space is shrinking. Hate speech is becoming normalised, immigration rules are tightening, government administration is becoming more exclusionary, protest organisers face police intimidation and civil society organisations are struggling financially. These create real barriers to people exercising their rights. Chega’s rise and its racist and xenophobic rhetoric now heard in parliament raise the risk that discrimination and violence against migrants will become politically acceptable.

A president committed to rights protection can set limits: vetoing discriminatory laws, refusing to suppress information the public needs and protecting communities and organisations under attack. The presidency alone cannot reverse the shrinking of civic space, but it can prevent the government from fully institutionalising a far-right agenda.

Human rights organisations, labour movements and migrant groups see this moment as an opportunity to strengthen protections, not a final victory. Turnout held strong despite devastating storms and emergency conditions, evidence that people were genuinely mobilised by the threat, particularly urban voters connected to civil society, including unions, who had already fought the government over labour rights. The organisations that coordinated the strike now expect the president to use his powers to defend rights.

How should Seguro use his presidential powers?

Seguro has been clear he won’t be the reason parliament is dissolved, and has committed to working with the government while demanding ‘solutions and results’. This means dissolution of parliament will be a last resort in a genuine crisis, not a tactical move to tackle normal political disagreements. He will use his veto power to block laws he thinks violate the constitution and rights and mediate between the government and opposition to push them towards compromise.

The challenge will be to keep the democratic parties, both government and opposition, at the centre while Chega tries to dictate the agenda. If Seguro dissolves parliament too quickly or without a strong reason, he’ll just fuel Chega’s narrative that the system is broken. If he’s too passive and doesn’t use his veto when rights are threatened, he’ll look complicit in democratic erosion. Both scenarios would help Chega: either the system looks incapable of functioning, or it looks unwilling to defend people’s rights.

Seguro will have to walk a very fine line between doing too much and doing too little, while a far-right opposition waits to exploit whatever mistakes he makes. If he gets it wrong, his historic electoral victory will give way to deeper crisis rather than democratic renewal.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Portugal’s far-right surge CIVICUS Lens 30.May.2025
‘Civil society must engage to prevent discussions devolving into demagoguery’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Jorge Máximo 28.May.2025
‘The rise of the populist right only further weakens trust in the political system’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Ana Carmo 19.Feb.2024

Over 8,554 grave violations against children have occurred in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories during the ongoing conflict. Credit: UN News

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 26 2026 (IPS)

The ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which began October 2023, has claimed the lives of more than 73,600 Palestinians and about 1,195 Israelis. But there are widespread charges accusing Israel of war crimes, genocide, torture and the abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails.

But these crimes continue despite warnings and condemnations by international bodies—including the United Nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Human Rights Council—with none of them having the power of enforcement.

A question at the UN press briefing March 24 highlighted a horrible crime unprecedented in any recent conflict.

Question: Multiple news outlets reported that Israeli soldiers tortured a one-year-old Palestinian child named Karim Abu Nasr in Gaza to pressure his father. The child reportedly suffered cigarette burns, marks, and nail wounds. Did you see this report?

UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric: I have seen the horrific description of that report, which clearly needs to be investigated, and reading the report itself is just horrific.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, who taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies, told Inter Press Service the report about the one-year-old (often described as 18 months old) Karim Abu Nassar being tortured by Israeli soldiers in Gaza is being widely carried by pro-Palestinian and regional outlets and is attributed to a specific named journalist and Palestine TV.

Multiple outlets however, including TRT World, Daily Sabah, Anadolu Agency syndication, and advocacy or solidarity networks, report a very similar narrative, said Dr. Ben-Meir.

The child, identified as Karim (or Jawad) Abu Nassar, was detained with his father near Al Maghazi in central Gaza. Palestine TV, citing a Gaza-based journalist, Osama al Kahlout, says Israeli soldiers tortured the child during the father’s interrogation, including extinguishing cigarettes on his leg, pricking him, and inserting a metal nail into his leg.

A medical report confirmed burn marks from cigarettes and puncture wounds from a nail. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) facilitated his release about 10 hours later, while the father remains detained, he said.

“Visual posts on social media show a toddler with bandaged or visibly injured legs, identified as Karim, which is consistent with the allegations of named local sources and official Palestinian media.”

Documented torture and ill treatment of Palestinian children

“There is substantial and mounting documentation that Israeli forces have systematically tortured, severely ill treated, or disappeared Palestinian children, including in Gaza since 7 October 2023,” said Dr. Ben-Meir.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretary General’s report on children and armed conflict documents over 8,000 grave violations against children in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, including verified cases of detention and ill treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli armed and security forces.

The same report notes 906 Palestinian children were detained in 2023, and that 84 children reported ill treatment during detention, along with reports of detention and sexual violence against children in Gaza.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud, Editor of Palestine Chronicle and former Managing Editor of the London-based Middle East Eye, told IPS “Dujarric is correct. This is horrific. In fact, it is beyond horrific. Equally frightening is that what has befallen this little boy, Karim, and his family is not an isolated incident but a repeated reality that has manifested itself in countless ways throughout the genocide.”

There are 21,000 ‘Karims’ who have been killed in the most brutal ways, he said. “Tens of thousands more have been wounded, maimed, or remain lifeless under the rubble of a fully destroyed Gaza.”

It is also horrific that those who tortured this one-year-old boy remain free to carry out further crimes. Those responsible for killing, torturing, and maiming Gaza’s children—and their parents—continue to face no accountability.

Equally disturbing, said Dr. Baroud, is that the United Nations, at best, can acknowledge the horror yet fails to stop it, rendering international law of no practical relevance to Palestinians.

“What use are words to those who have perished in the Israeli genocide of Gaza? What use are reports, discussions, investigations, and lamentations if the perpetrators are not held accountable?”

“I am familiar with the report, and as devastating as it is, it merely mirrors countless other accounts of children who have endured similar fates—and worse.”

Palestinians are demanding action. Without it, the horror will continue, no matter how many words are written or reports are produced to recognize it, declared Dr. Baroud.

Meanwhile, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to pursue arrest warrants for three Israeli ministers she accuses of being responsible for “systematic torture” amounting to genocide.

In a new report presented to the UN Human Rights Council this week, Albanese names National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defence Minister Israel Katz as the primary political figures involved in shaping policies that enabled the torture of Palestinians after 7 October 2023

Amplifying further, Dr. Ben-Meir pointed out that the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) in a 2025 report states that “Israeli forces killed, maimed, tortured, starved, abducted and displaced Palestinian children every single day in 2025″ and describes widespread torture and ill treatment of children at all stages of detention.

Gazan children were detained and transferred to facilities such as Sde Teiman, where they report being stripped, starved, beaten, confined in cages, subjected to electric shocks, beaten with sticks, and exposed to a “disco room” with deafening music and random assaults—acts that meet standard legal definitions of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, he said.

These accounts are based on multiple child testimonies and legal documentation and are presented as evidence of criminal conduct and war crimes.

“This report is also confirmed by Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza during the war, with whom I spoke.”

Use of children as human shields and related abuse

Peer-reviewed and legal analyses, said Dr. Ben-Meir, also document episodes where Israeli forces used Palestinian children as human shields, which is itself a war crime and frequently accompanied by physical and psychological abuse.

Such practices, given the threats and harm involved, qualify as torture under international law. Tragically, it is a longstanding pattern of abuse of Palestinians, with children among the victims, by Israeli forces.

How to frame this as war crimes

Under the Convention against Torture and the Rome Statute, intentionally inflicting severe physical or mental pain for purposes such as obtaining information or confessions, punishing, intimidating, or coercing, when carried out by state agents in an armed conflict, constitutes torture and a war crime and, when widespread or systematic, can be a crime against humanity.

The Sde Teiman practices—electric shocks, starvation, severe beatings, and sensory torture—clearly meet the same threshold at scale. Coupled with UN-verified patterns of child detention and ill treatment and documented use of children as human shields.

The Karim case, as reported, fits that definition almost perfectly: a state agent intentionally inflicts severe pain on a toddler in front of his father, specifically to force a confession, he said.

“The evidentiary picture strongly supports the argument that Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity involving children,” declared Dr. Ben-Meir.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Who benefits from a war of choice against Iran?

The immediate political winners may include President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But if the war continues for a longer period, the political consequences for both Trump and Netanyahu could be uncertain. However, the most consistent beneficiaries are defense contractors, defense manufacturers and military lobbyists, who profit regardless of the outcome.

A. K. Abdul Momen

Despite vast reserves of oil and gas, the very engines of global prosperity—many nations across the region continue to face instability, poverty, and insecurity. From Palestine to Yemen, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, millions lack basic necessities, including food, safety, and economic opportunity.

In fact, millions of people in Muslims countries like Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Oman, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, etc have been suffering from war and terror, from food deficiency and safety and security of life and liberty.

No wonder, their wealth often flows outward, with elites investing in more stable, non-Muslim countries rather than building productive industries, infrastructure, or research capacity at home. Their investment, if any, in their home countries or Muslim communities are mostly concentrated in building a mosque, a prayer house or a madrassa for poor students.

They are reluctant to build a hospital, a road, a manufacturing or industrial plant, a bridge, a technical school or a research center. This imbalance contributes to long-term structural weakness.

A critical question emerges: what ensures national security?

Increasingly, it appears that states possessing nuclear weapons and long-range missile capabilities enjoy greater deterrence and stability. The case of North Korea illustrates this paradox.

Despite isolation and adversaries, it maintains regime security through nuclear capability. This raises a troubling implication: does survival in today’s world require nuclear armament? Should their leadership acquire nuclear capability to safeguard their national security and stability?

The consequences of a U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran would extend far beyond the battlefield. Even after hostilities end, the region would likely face prolonged economic damage, weakened infrastructure, and fractured political trust.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, Lebanon and Iran could suffer severe economic disruption and internal instability.

Moreover, the strategic dynamics of such a conflict risk deepening divisions within the Muslim world itself. Military actions and retaliations particularly involving foreign bases in regional states could lead to intra-regional damage, further destabilizing already fragile alliances.

Another question, should leadership allow foreign bases in its home turf to guarantee national security? Or will it welcome more insecurity and conflict? Should leadership deny foreign bases in its own territory? Can they avoid such bases?

In case of Bangladesh, the ousted popular Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina refused her territory to be used as a military base for a foreign government and it cost her job, her government was overthrown. Can they afford to deny a powerful foreign government?

From a geopolitical perspective, wars of this nature often reshape control over resources and influence. Economic motivations particularly access to energy and mineral resources cannot be overlooked in understanding strategic decision-making.

This leads to a deeper ethical question: do power and victory ultimately outweigh principles such as justice, human rights, and moral leadership? Ethics, human rights, fairness and morality are these the sermons of the weak and priests only? Does Machiavelli sounds right— survival of the fittest?

In fact, the logic often resembles the political realism associated with Niccolò Machiavelli—where success is measured by survival and dominance rather than ethical conduct. Machiavelli describes a sneaky, cunning, and manipulative personality that uses deceit, duplicity, and unethical methods to achieve goals often in politics and business as a success story.

And history tends to remember the victors only. Yet the long-term cost—human suffering, instability, and moral compromise—raises the question of whether victory alone defines true leadership.

Professor Dr. A. K. Abdul Momen is Former Foreign Minister of Bangladesh

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Sanjit Pariyar/NurPhoto via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Mar 25 2026 (IPS)

Less than six months after Nepal’s Generation Z rose up in protest, the country has a new prime minister. A 35-year-old former rapper who soundtracked the protests swept to power in a landslide in the 5 March election.

Balendra Shah defeated former prime minister KP Sharma Oli, whose third stint as prime minister was cut short by the protests, beating him in his own turf. After years of fragile coalition governments, in which Sharma Oli and two other men of advancing age repeatedly swapped the role of prime minister, Nepal has chosen to change direction.

Gen Z-led protests

The September 2025 protests were triggered by the government’s banning of 26 social media platforms in an evident response to the ‘nepokids’ trend, in which people used social media to satirise the ostentatiously wealthy lifestyles of politicians’ family members, while most young people experienced daily economic struggles amid high inflation and youth unemployment. In a country where the median age is just 25, the ban was the final straw, activating long-simmering anger about corruption, poor public services and a political system that refused to listen to young people.

When young people took to the streets, the state unleashed violence. The deadliest day was 8 September, when some protesters broke into the parliamentary complex and police fired live military-grade ammunition, shooting many victims in the head. Nineteen people died that day, and overall at least 76 people died in the protests.

Rather than silence the protests, the state’s lethal crackdown swelled them, making clear this was about more than the social media ban; it was a struggle for Nepal’s future. Even more people took to the streets. On 9 September, Sharma Oli resigned. Some protesters turned to violence, while the army took over security and imposed a nationwide curfew. But events soon took a decisive turn. Chief Justice Sushila Karki was sworn in as interim prime minister on 12 September, kickstarting a process that led to the election. The interim government agreed to establish a Gen Z Council, a formal body designed to bridge the gap between the government and young people and enable them to hold it accountable and monitor implementation of reforms.

As the latest State of Civil Society Report sets out, Nepal’s movement inspired many of the year’s other Gen Z-led mobilisations. Nepali activists used the gaming platform Discord, including for a radical exercise in democracy that saw 10,000 people take part in online discussions that put forward Karki as interim prime minister. Morocco’s protesters also used Discord to coordinate their actions, while the Gen Z movement in Madagascar, where the army ultimately forced the government to quit, connected with Nepal’s Discord communities to learn from their organising. Movements in several countries adopted Nepal’s protest symbol, the skull-and-straw-hat flag from the One Piece manga, identifying themselves as part of the same global movement.

Around the world, Gen Z-led protests have commonly faced violent state repression but have forced real concessions: Bulgaria’s government quit, while politicians dropped unpopular policies in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. In Bangladesh, where a Gen Z-led protest movement ousted an authoritarian government in 2024, the country recently held its first credible election in almost two decades.

Time for change

The new energy unleashed by Nepal’s Gen Z-led protests was reflected in the registration of over 800,000 new voters, more parties standing than ever before, a profusion of younger candidates and an election campaign focused on corruption and good governance.

The result was a shock. Coalition governments are the norm in Nepal, but the centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) won an outright majority, taking 182 of 275 House of Representatives seats after a campaign that made intensive use of social media. The three established parties all sustained heavy losses.

Shah used his music to attack corruption and inequality, resonating with the Gen Z movement during the protests, when one of his songs was viewed over 10 million times on YouTube. But he isn’t a completely new political figure, having become mayor of the capital, Kathmandu, in a surprise result when he ran as an independent in 2022. His track record there suggests grounds for concern. He’s rarely made himself available for media questioning, preferring to communicate directly via social media, where he’s known for making controversial outbursts. He also received criticism for deploying police against street vendors and launching ‘demolition drives’ to clear illegally built structures with minimal notice, leading to clashes between police and locals.

Shah now has a mandate to deliver change, and expectations are high. But he faces the challenge of reforming a typically resistant bureaucracy while delivering on his economic promises amid difficult global conditions worsened by the Israeli-US war on Iran, which threatens the remittances sent by the many Nepali workers based in Gulf countries, which constitute one quarter of the country’s GDP. He’ll need to navigate the difficult foreign policy balance between Nepal’s two powerful and often antagonistic neighbours, China and India. The new government must also ensure accountability for human rights violations during the 2025 protests, starting with releasing the report of a commission set up to investigate protest deaths, which hasn’t yet been made public.

The obvious danger, given these challenges and an outsized mandate, is that the government will adopt a heavy-handed approach, pushing through change while failing to listen. This is precisely when civil society is needed, to step in to hold the new government to account and ensure it respects human rights, including the right to keep expressing dissent.

Nepal’s Gen Z movement must guard against co-option by the new administration. The new government must acknowledge the vital role of Nepal’s outspoken young generation by moving quickly to form and resource the Gen Z Council and fully respecting its autonomy. The movement that helped bring Shah to power must stay engaged.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Asoka Bandarage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Mar 25 2026 (IPS)

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits member states from using threats or force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Violating international law, the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, 2026. The ostensible reason for this unprovoked aggression was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The United States is the first and only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, against Japan in August 1945. Some officials in Israel have threatened to use a “doomsday weapon” against Gaza. On March 14, David Sacks, billionaire venture capitalist and AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration, warned that Israel may resort to nuclear weapons as its war with Iran spirals out of control and the country faces “destruction.”

Although for decades Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, opposed nuclear weapons on religious grounds, in the face of current existential threats it is likely that Iran will pursue their development.

On March 22, the head of the WHO warned of possible nuclear risks after nuclear facilities in both Iran and Israel were attacked. Indeed, will the current war in the Middle East continue for months or years, or end sooner with the possible use of a nuclear weapon by Israel or the United States?

Widening Destruction

Apart from the threat of nuclear conflagration—and what many analysts consider an impending ground invasion by American troops—extensive attacks using bombs, missiles, and drones are continuing apace, causing massive loss of life and destruction of resources and infrastructure. US–Israel airstrikes have killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top Iranian officials.

Countless civilians have died, including some 150 girls in a primary school in Minab, in what UNESCO has called a “grave violation of humanitarian law.” Moreover, the targeting of desalination plants by both sides could severely disrupt water supplies across desert regions.

Iran’s retaliatory attacks on United States military bases in Persian Gulf countries have disrupted global air travel. Even more significantly, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz—the critical maritime energy chokepoint through which 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas pass daily—has blocked the flow of energy supplies and goods, posing a severe threat to the fossil fuel–driven global economy.

A global economic crisis is emerging, with soaring oil prices, power shortages, inflation, loss of livelihoods, and deep uncertainty over food security and survival.

The inconsistent application of international law, along with structural limitations of the United Nations, erodes trust in global governance and the moral authority of Western powers and multilateral institutions. Resolution 2817 (2026), adopted by the UN Security Council on March 12, condemns Iran’s “egregious attacks” against its neighbors without any condemnation of US–Israeli actions—an imbalance that underscores this concern.

The current crisis is exposing fault lines in the neo-colonial political, economic, and moral order that has been in place since the Second World War. Iran’s defiance poses a significant challenge to longstanding patterns of intervention and regime-change agendas pursued by the United States and its allies in the Global South.

The difficulty the United States faces in rallying NATO and other allies also reflects a notable geopolitical shift. Meanwhile, the expansion of yuan-based oil trade and alternative financial settlement mechanisms is weakening the petrodollar system and dollar dominance.

Opposition within the United States—including from segments of conservatives and Republicans—signals growing skepticism about the ideological and moral basis of a US war against Iran seemingly driven by Israel.

A New World Order?

The unipolar world dominated by the United States—rooted in inequality, coercion, and militarism—is destabilizing, fragmenting, and generating widespread chaos and suffering. Challenges to this order, including from Iran, point toward a fragmented multipolar world in which multiple actors possess agency and leverage.

The BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, along with Iran, the UAE, and other members—represents efforts to create alternative economic and financial systems, including development banks and reserve currencies that challenge Western financial dominance.

However, is BRICS leading the world toward a much-needed order based on equity, partnership, and peace?

The behavior of BRICS countries during the current crisis does not indicate strong collective leadership or commitment to such principles. Instead, many appear to be leveraging the situation for national advantage, particularly regarding access to energy supplies.

A clear example of this opportunism is India, the current head of the BRICS bloc. Historically a leader of non-alignment and a supporter of the Palestinian cause, India now presents itself as a neutral party upholding international law and state sovereignty. However, it co-sponsored and supported UN Security Council Resolution 2817 (2026), which condemns only Iran.

India is also part of the USA–Israel–India–UAE strategic nexus involving defense cooperation, technology sharing, and counterterrorism. Additionally, it participates in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) with the United States, Japan, and Australia, aimed at countering China’s growing influence.

In effect, despite its leadership role in BRICS, India is closely aligned with the United States, raising questions about its ability to offer independent leadership in shaping a new world order.

As a group, BRICS does not fundamentally challenge corporate hegemony, the concentration of wealth among a global elite, or entrenched technological and military dominance. While it rejects aspects of Western geopolitical hierarchy, it largely upholds neoliberal economic principles: competition, free trade, privatization, open markets, export-led growth, globalization, and rapid technological expansion.

The current Middle East crisis underscores the need to question the assumption that globalization, market expansion, and technological growth are the foundations of human well-being.

The oil and food crises, declining remittances from Asian workers in the Middle East, and reduced tourism due to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and regional airspace all highlight the fragility of global interdependence.

These conditions call for consideration of alternative frameworks—bioregionalism, import substitution, local control of resources, food and energy self-sufficiency, and renewable energy—in place of dependence on imported fossil fuels and global supply chains.

Both the Western economic model and its BRICS variant continue to prioritize techno-capitalist expansion and militarism, despite overwhelming evidence linking these systems to environmental destruction and social inequality. While it is difficult for individual countries to challenge this dominant model, history offers lessons in collective resistance.

Collective Resistance

One of the earliest examples of nationalist economic resistance in the post- World War II period was the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the creation of the National Iranian Oil Company in 1951 under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. He was overthrown on August 19, 1953, in a coup orchestrated by the US CIA and British intelligence (MI6), and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed to protect Western oil interests.

A milestone for decolonization occurred in Egypt in 1956, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company. Despite military intervention by Israel, the United Kingdom, and France, Nasser retained control, emerging as a symbol of Arab and Third World nationalism.

Following political independence, many former colonies sought to avoid entanglement in the Cold War through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), officially founded in Belgrade in 1961. Leaders including Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike promoted autonomous development paths aligned with national priorities and cultural traditions.

However, maintaining economic sovereignty proved far more difficult. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was assassinated in 1961 with the involvement of US and Belgian interests after attempting to assert control over national resources. Kwame Nkrumah was similarly overthrown in a US-backed coup in 1966.

In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa (“African socialism”) sought to build community-based development and food security, but faced both internal challenges and external opposition, ultimately limiting its success and discouraging similar efforts elsewhere.

UN declarations from the 1970s reflect Global South resistance to the Bretton Woods system. Notably, the 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (Resolution 3201) called for equitable cooperation between developed and developing countries based on dignity and sovereign equality.

Today, these declarations are more relevant than ever, as Iran and other Global South nations confront overlapping crises of economic instability, neocolonial pressures, and intensifying geopolitical rivalry.

Dr Asoka Bandarage has served on the faculties of Brandeis University, Georgetown University and Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World: Colonial and Neoliberal Origins, Ecological and Collective Alternatives and many other publications (De Gruyter, 2023).

IPS UN Bureau

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CIVICUS discusses Nepal’s upcoming election with youth activist Anusha Khanal of the Gen Z Movement Alliance, a youth-led civil society coalition mobilising for democratic accountability and governance reform in Nepal.

Anusha Khanal

What triggered the Gen Z protests, and how did the state respond?

The immediate trigger was the government revealing its authoritarian tendencies by banning 26 popular social media platforms. This happened during the ‘nepokids’ trend, in which people exposed the wealth of politicians’ families, contrasting with widespread economic desperation. Inflation was high and unemployment among young people stood at around 23 per cent, and there were no pathways for change within existing political structures. But this wasn’t just about jobs. Young people demanded accountability for decades of corruption, poor governance, service delivery failures and a political system completely disconnected from our realities. The leaders of three parties had rotated in power for years without delivering anything meaningful. We mobilised because we had nothing to lose.

The response was brutal. On the first day of protests, police killed several young people. The government refused to show any responsibility, instead seeking to frame the movement as violent and deny it any legitimacy. It criminalised youth anger instead of listening to it. The choice to emphasise property damage over deaths when some buildings were burned and vandalised told us everything about where their priorities lay. The government showed it did not care about young people.

But repression didn’t stop the movement; it accelerated it. Thousands more young people mobilised, and eventually the pressure became impossible to ignore. Oli’s resignation was a forced concession. But it exposed something important: the political system only moves when threatened directly. That’s a lesson we’re carrying into these elections.

How did civil society organisations engage with the movement?

Young people created the movement, not civil society organisations. Once it started, we received a lot of support from wider civil society. It became a people’s movement, with people of all ages taking part, in person and in spirit. Many civil society groups made a conscious choice to support it, document what was happening, share knowledge, help shape narratives, amplify demands and help exert pressure to translate grassroots anger into political demands. We pushed for accountability, investigations into the killings, protection for protesters and systemic reforms around corruption and governance. We insisted that any negotiation include young people at the table, as stakeholders in decision-making.

A major win was a 10-point agreement with the interim government that included commitments to address corruption, improve governance, ensure youth participation in decision-making and move towards more inclusive democracy. We also pushed for the establishment of the Gen Z Council, a body designed to hold government accountable, monitor implementation of reforms and bridge the gap between the state and young people.

But we’ve been realistic about what civil society can and cannot do. We can organise, advocate, document and monitor. We cannot force a government to implement reforms if the bureaucracy resists or political will collapses after elections. That’s why we’re now focused on maintaining pressure and building systems that make it harder for future governments to ignore youth demands.

How have election candidates addressed the movement’s demands?

Anti-corruption and good governance have become dominant themes across party manifestos. All parties are talking about digital governance, e-governance, going cashless and paperless. Some are promising to establish commissions to investigate past corruption or audit public officials’ assets going back decades. Others focus on timecard systems for service delivery, budget transparency and digitisation of transactions. It’s just that corruption is so visible that ignoring it would be political suicide.

The problem is that most parties are vague on implementation. They describe the what but not the how. There are also ideological differences, but most parties are talking about systemic reform and public-private partnerships.

Across the board, parties are responding to the movement’s anti-corruption demand because they have to. The question is whether these commitments are genuine or just campaign rhetoric.

Why are women and excluded groups still so underrepresented among candidates?

Campaign financing is a massive problem. The government sets spending limits, but everyone knows that’s not what happens on the ground. To run a serious campaign with widespread reach, you need sponsorship from wealthy backers or business interests. If you’re a woman earning a minimum wage, you simply cannot compete against candidates funded by millionaires. There is no public financing system, no state support for candidates from marginalised backgrounds. The economic system excludes most women and poor people before we even get to party selection processes.

Safety is another critical issue that doesn’t get enough attention. Digital violence against women running for office is rampant. Women and queer candidates face abuse, harassment and threats online and offline. When we encourage female and queer colleagues to run, the response is often hesitancy, due to the lack of support and because we haven’t created safe enough spaces for them to participate in politics. Although the constitution guarantees women 33 per cent representation, the reality on the ground is completely different.

Then there’s the distribution of candidacy slots within parties, which is opaque and controlled by party leaders. Even after public pressure, many parties failed to meet the female quota in direct candidacies. Some did better in proportional representation slots, but even there, they selected women who are mostly well-connected and wealthy. The movement emphasised inclusion, but we’ve regressed when it comes to candidate selection.

What obstacles stand in the way of reform?

The first challenge is that we’re almost certainly heading towards a coalition government, which means compromise on every issue. When multiple parties have to negotiate and share power, reform agendas get watered down. Parties will prioritise holding their coalition together over pushing through the anti-corruption and governance reforms they promised. We’ve seen this pattern before. What isn’t clear yet is what kind of coalition will result and what compromises will be made.

The second challenge is the bureaucracy. Nepal’s bureaucracy can be notoriously resistant to change, transparency and accountability. A reform can pass parliament and still die in implementation because mid-level bureaucrats refuse to change how they work. Even though the law to establish the Gen Z Council has been passed, it hasn’t been formed yet. We can identify problems, document failures and advocate loudly, but we cannot force a government to act. If the bureaucracy decides to drag its feet, we have limited leverage. Structural incentives favour the status quo, and that’s before we even consider whether individual politicians will prioritise reforms over personal interests or patronage networks.

But we’re not giving up. Civil society’s role now is to maintain constant pressure, document what does and doesn’t get implemented and call attention when governments fail to keep their promises. The Gen Z Council gives us a formal mechanism to do this, and we can also raise our voices independently of it. We need to build broader coalitions, keep the movement’s demands visible in public discourse and make clear that if a government fails to deliver, there will be consequences. Real change is slow and difficult — but it’s possible if civil society stays organised and vigilant and doesn’t compromise on core demands.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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A Sudanese family in rural Wasat AL Gadaref, Gedaref State, near Khartoum, Sudan. Credit: UNICEF/Osman Saif

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 20 2026 (IPS)

The past two weeks have marked a significantly violent escalation in the Sudanese Civil War, with drone strikes and artillery shelling between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) causing widespread destruction, casualties, and displacement. With humanitarian responses critically underfunded and the scale of needs, including the hunger crisis, continuing to grow, experts warn that millions in Sudan could be affected by famine, violence, or prolonged displacement.

Since March 4, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has recorded more than 200 civilian deaths resulting from drone strikes in the Kordofan region and White Nile State. In West Kordofan, SAF drone strikes have killed at least 152 civilians, hitting densely populated areas including hospitals and markets. The conflict has also spread to White Nile State, where strikes have targeted the state capital, Kosti, as well as electrical facilities—causing widespread power outages—and a student dormitory.

“It is deeply troubling that despite multiple reminders, warnings, and appeals, parties to the conflict in Sudan continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons with wide-area impacts in populated areas,” said Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “It will soon be three full years since the senseless conflict in Sudan began, devastating millions of lives and livelihoods. Yet the violence, fueled by these new technologies of war, simply keeps spreading. It is high time it came to an end.”

South Darfur has also been heavily affected, with drone strikes on March 12 and 13 causing extensive damage across multiple neighborhoods. In West Darfur, strikes on a market in Akidong triggered a massive explosion that impacted the Adre border crossing—a critical lifeline for humanitarian aid deliveries and a key route in preventing widespread starvation. On March 16, a deadly drone strike hit the Sudan-Chad border in Chad’s Tine region, killing 17 people and injuring several others. Local eyewitnesses told reporters that the strikes hit mourners at a funeral, as well as children playing nearby.

UN Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Farhan Haq said that the attack reflects a growing pattern of violence affecting border communities, raising concerns about broader regional instability between neighboring countries. “The UN calls once again on all parties to comply with their clearly known obligations under international humanitarian law, which include protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and ensuring the rapid, safe, unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance to whoever needs it, and wherever it is needed,” Haq said.

Following the attack, Chad bolstered its security forces along the Sudan-Chad border to prepare for defensive operations. On March 19, Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby confirmed in a statement shared to social media that Chad’s army has been ordered to “retaliate, starting from tonight, to any attack coming from Sudan.”

“Despite various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border, the town of Tine has again been the target of a drone attack,” said a spokesperson for the Chadian government. “This latest assault of extreme gravity has caused the death of 17 of our compatriots and left several others injured.”

As violence continues to escalate and spill across borders, its humanitarian consequences within Sudan are becoming increasingly pronounced. Figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) show that approximately 9 million people are currently internally displaced across Sudan, marking one of the largest displacement crises in the world. On March 17, several people were killed in the Bara locality, northeast of El Obeid City, the capital of North Kordofan, causing over 150 displacements from Sherim Mima Village in Bara to Um Dam Haj alone.

Displacement has gone down in recent days, with roughly 3.8 million civilians recorded to have begun returning home, particularly to Khartoum and eastern regions. Despite this, returnees face a host of challenges, including the loss of their livelihoods, infrastructure damage, and a lack of access to basic services. Roughly 55 percent of internally displaced civilians were children under 18 years old.

Additional reports from humanitarian agencies paint a grim picture of the conditions that civilians face. Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), reports that civilians are at great risk of being harmed by explosive remnants on the ground, recording 23 injuries, including four women and seven children, sustaining severe injuries.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that rampant and concurrent outbreaks of cholera, measles, dengue, and Hepatitis E. have overwhelmed national health systems, which were already weakened by the vast influx of injured persons.

The World Food Programme (WFP) states that approximately 21.2 million people are currently food insecure across Sudan, with women and children disproportionately affected. The majority of female-headed households are critically food insecure. According to UNICEF, “catastrophic” malnutrition rates were recorded in Um Baru and Kornoi in North Darfur. Numerous regions are at risk of developing famine-like conditions and face severe shortages of food, clean water, healthcare, and other basic services.

Despite immense access challenges, the UN and its partners have been working on the frontlines to restore access to basic services, managing to install eight 2,000-liter water tanks in displacement shelters and schools. UNICEF has reached struggling communities with food assistance and vaccination programs, providing 787,000 children with nutrition screenings, 25,100 children with malnutrition treatment, and over 540,000 children with vaccines for Measles and Rubella.

However, these efforts remain severely constrained by chronic underfunding, with the 2026 Humanitarian Response Plan for Sudan being only 16 percent funded, reaching only $454 million of its $2.9 billion goal, which would assist over 20 million crisis-affected civilians across the country. An additional $1.6 billion is required to reach refugees and host communities in neighboring countries.

IPS UN Bureau

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The Russo-Ukrainian war, which began in February 2014, shows no signs of ending. Credit: UNOCHA/Dmytro Filipskyy

By Nickolay Kapitonenko
KYIV, Ukraine, Mar 19 2026 (IPS)

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the tension, violence and uncertainty in the world in recent years. The number of wars is growing, more and more money is being spent on weapons, and the rhetoric of major powers is becoming increasingly decisive.

The latest escalation in the Middle East has reignited the debate about the start of World War III. The consequences of the Israeli and US strikes on Iran are being felt to varying degrees far beyond the region, at least by those who follow oil prices.

The interests of numerous great powers are at stake, and third parties are considering their next moves and making political statements. Opinions range widely, from the belief that there can be no Third World War because of the existence of nuclear weapons, to the conviction that it has already begun. So, what is really going on?

A journalistic and academic concept

When historians talk about world wars, they mean two unique events in the past. Their scale, the involvement of a wide range of states, the level of violence and the nature of the consequences put them in a league of their own.

To understand how these wars differed from any others, one need only glance at the diagram of human casualties, defence spending, or destruction in various armed conflicts of the 20th century.

However, historians also have different opinions. One of them, better known in his political capacity, Winston Churchill, once described the Seven Years’ War as a world war. This protracted 18th-century conflict drew most of the major powers of the time into direct combat; it spanned numerous battlefields in Europe, North America, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean; and it had serious geopolitical consequences. How was this not a world war?

By the fact that it was not a total war between industrialised states, the scale of the clashes was rather limited, as were the number of armies; and the consequences, although serious, were not systemic — this may be the response of more conservative historians than the British Prime Minister.

The number of armed conflicts in the world has been growing over the past few years: 2024 has been a record year since World War II.

‘World War’ is both a journalistic and academic concept. To enhance the effect, attract attention or draw conditional analogies, it can be used to describe more events than just the First and Second World Wars. For example, the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century or even the Cold War are sometimes referred to as world wars.

Within this logic, individual elements of a world war can be seen even today. The number of armed conflicts in the world has been growing over the past few years: 2024 has been a record year since World War II. According to some estimates, 61 armed conflicts in 36 countries were recorded this year, which is significantly higher than the average for the previous three decades.

Global military spending is also on the rise: today it has reached 2.5 per cent of the global economy, the highest figure since 2011 and an upward trend since 2021. This is still significantly less than during the Cold War, when a range of 3 to 6 per cent was the norm. Analysing these figures, it is clear that global security has deteriorated in recent years, but how critically?

A more academic approach would be to define a world war as one in which most of the major powers are involved; which has global reach and is total in nature; leads to enormous loss and destruction; and significantly changes the world upon its conclusion. Direct and large-scale armed conflict between major powers is a mandatory criterion.

And this is the main argument against the idea that World War III has already begun. No matter how high the level of destabilisation in the modern world, no matter how far large-scale regional conflicts have escalated, and no matter how much money states spend on armaments, this is not enough for a world war. Large-scale military operations involving major powers are needed.

All just fears?

This has not happened in the world for a long time. The interval between the Second and Third World Wars turned out to be much longer than between the First and Second. Nuclear weapons played a central role in this, raising the price of war so high that major powers began to avoid it by any means possible. This safeguard has been in place for over 80 years and looks set to continue.

Peace, or rather the absence of war between major powers, remains one of the central elements of the current international order. International institutions and regimes may collapse or weaken, regional wars may break out, but the likelihood of war between major powers remains extremely low.

Proponents of the Third World War theory sometimes point out that even in the absence of full-scale war between major powers, other manifestations occur: hybrid wars, cyberattacks, or proxy wars. This is true, but all these outbreaks of conflict are several levels below a world war in terms of their destructive potential and are not total in nature.

Throughout history, states have fought through proxies or resorted to information, trade or religious wars, but we do not consider these wars to be world wars — except in a symbolic sense.

A systemic war does not necessarily have to be a world war

Unlike the 2003 war in Iraq, the strikes on Iran are taking place in a world where, instead of US hegemony, there is complex competition between at least two centres of power. This adds nuances and forces other states to respond, directly or indirectly, for example, by supplying weapons or intelligence data, supporting one side or the other.

But this does not make the war global. Arms supplies, for example, are a common practice found in most regional conflicts, as is diplomatic or financial support from allies or partners. Even if American troops use the technology or expertise of partners – such as Ukrainian drones – this does not mean that Ukraine is being drawn into the war. Just as American arms supplies to Ukraine during the Russian-Ukrainian war did not mean US involvement in the war.

For a world war, the key ingredient is still missing: direct confrontation between major powers. In addition to world wars, there are also systemic wars. In these conflicts, it is not so much the scale that is important as the change in the international order to which they lead.

The Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the First and Second World Wars mentioned above were systemic wars: after their completion, the rules of international politics were rewritten and new ones were adopted at peace conferences and congresses. A systemic war does not necessarily have to be a world war.

Moments of hegemonic crisis and the beginning of the struggle for hegemony always carry with them the danger of new wars, arms races and escalations.

The current destabilisation and growth of various risks are largely linked to the struggle for the future of the international order. The United States and China have almost fallen into the ‘Thucydides trap’ — a strategic logic similar to that which led to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC. At that time, the narrowing of the power gap between the hegemon and the challenger forced the Spartans to start a preventive war.

Today, there are well-founded fears that the decline of American hegemony, the rise of China and the approach of a bipolar world will sharply increase the likelihood of direct armed conflict between the superpowers.

The decisive, to put it mildly, steps taken by the US administration can also be considered preventive actions aimed at strategically weakening China’s position while Washington still has the upper hand. Such moments of hegemonic crisis and the beginning of the struggle for hegemony always carry with them the danger of new wars, arms races and escalations.

We are in the midst of such a crisis. It is systemic in the sense that it is not just a collection of regional conflicts in different parts of the world, which have become more numerous, but a manifestation of a large-scale redistribution of influence and power on a global scale. This redistribution will entail changes in the international order, because the rules of the game are linked to the balance of power.

If, at some point, the leaders of major states decide that it is worth taking the risk of war and paying the price, the systemic crisis will turn into a world war. But this, as the Spartans themselves said, is ‘if’.

Nickolay Kapitonenko is an associate professor at the Institute of International Relations at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and director of the Centre for International Relations Studies.

Source: International Politics and Society, Brussels

IPS UN Bureau

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Street scen of Herat province.

By External Source
HERAT, Afghanistan, Mar 18 2026 (IPS)

When Khadija Ahmadzada was arrested in Herat province of Afghanistan in January this year, it sparked widespread domestic and international protests. Women’s rights activists and social media users raised their voices with slogans such as “Sport is not a crime,” “Education is a right for women,” and “Don’t erase women,” often using the hashtag #BeHerVoice.

At the time of her arrest, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, Richard Bennett, had called for the immediate release of taekwondo coach Khadija Ahmadzada, expressing deep concern over her detention by the Taliban.

She has since been released but the outcry underlined the need for supporting Afghan women athletes, which activists around the world pointed out is a collective responsibility and warned that remaining silent in the face of oppression carries dangerous consequences.

Khadija Ahmadzada, 22, was an award-winning taekwondo athlete and coach of Afghanistan’s national youth team during the republic era. When the Taliban came to power, she tried to keep the sport alive for women and girls, creating opportunities for them to train, learn, and move forward at a time when those opportunities were steadily disappearing.

Herat was once a city where women’s sports clubs thrived. The women were highly motivated and recorded many achievements. The centers were not merely places for physical training; they also served as educational, social, and empowerment spaces for women and girls. Following the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan, all women’s sports facilities were shut down, and female athletes were categorically barred from continuing their activities.

Sports clubs have been closed to women since 2021, shortly after the Taliban returned to power, adding to a raft of measures put in place based on the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law. At the time, it was claimed they would reopen when a “safe environment” had been established. But as of January 2026, no sports club has reopened, and women are still barred from competition.

Known not only as a skilled athlete but also a determined and committed coach, Khadija Ahmadzada continued her work quietly under the Taliban’s strict restrictions, ensuring that women who wanted to train could still find a way. But her efforts did not remain hidden. In January 2026, she was arrested.

Her arrest highlights the intense pressure on active women in Afghanistan and reflects how they are forced to take forbidden paths to protect their basic rights and stay part of society.

Khadija Ahmadzada was trained in taekwondo professionally at the Jumong Taekwondo Academy in Herat under the guidance of Korean experts. Within a short time, she became a member of Afghanistan’s national youth team and won medals in domestic and regional competitions. She began teaching and training girls in taekwondo after ending her professional athletic career.

One of Khadija Ahmadzada’s students, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons said, “she is a skilled and devoted coach, and I am proud of her courage and selflessness”. When the Taliban’s morality police came to arrest Khadija, she assisted her students leave the club quietly while she stayed behind in defiance of the Taliban’s rules and was detained.

In the early days after Herat fell to the Taliban in August 2021, they began a gradual process of shutting down women and girls’ sports centers in stages. First the regime’s morality police issued verbal orders to operators of sports centers. The screws were tightened further in subsequent actions by confiscating equipment, locking up the gates of sports clubs and arrests of the owners and coaches.

Khadija’s two weeks in prison put tremendous pressure on her family. They repeatedly appealed to local representatives, community elders, and officials to help secure her release. Khadija was finally released after 13 days of imprisonment with a written pledge to not repeat the offense. Yet her freedom was less an end to suffering than a reminder of a life endured under Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Khadija established an underground taekwondo training program in the Jebraeil neighborhood of Herat, which has become a symbol of women’s resistance against the Taliban’s strict restrictions. She noted that before the Taliban came, many women were active in this field and earned a living through it. When the Taliban took over, sports halls were closed by their orders, women’s teams were disbanded, and female athletes and coaches either stayed at home or left the country. Among those who remained, women were forced to choose between complete silence or quiet resistance. Khadija was one of those who chose the latter.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

 
CIVICUS discusses China’s tech-enabled repression with Fergus Ryan, a Senior Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), where he specialises in how the Chinese Communist Party shapes global information environments through censorship, propaganda and platform governance. His research includes a major study on China’s AI ecosystem and its human rights impacts, as well as investigations into China’s use of foreign influencers.

Fergus Ryan

What AI systems is China developing?

Based on our research, China is rapidly developing a multi-layered AI ecosystem designed to expand state control.

Tech giants are building multimodal large language models (LLMs) such as Alibaba’s Qwen and Baidu’s Ernie Bot, which censor and reshape descriptions of politically sensitive images. Hardware companies including Dahua, Hikvision and SenseTime supply the camera networks that feed into these systems.

The state is building what amounts to an AI-driven criminal justice pipeline. This includes City Brain operations centres such as Shanghai’s Pudong district, which process massive surveillance data, as well as the 206 System, developed by iFlyTek, which analyses evidence and recommends criminal sentences. Inside prisons, AI monitors inmates’ facial expressions and tracks their emotions.

AI-enabled satellite surveillance, such as the Xinjiang Jiaotong-01, enables autonomous real-time tracking over politically sensitive regions. Additionally, AI-enabled fishing platforms such as Sea Eagle expand economic extraction in the exclusive economic zones of countries including Mauritania and Vanuatu, displacing artisanal fishing communities.

How does China use AI for censorship and policing?

China relies on a hybrid model of censorship that fuses the speed of AI with human political judgement. The government requires companies to self-censor, creating a commercial market for AI moderation tools. Tech giants such as Baidu and Tencent have industrialised this process: systems automatically scan images, text and videos to detect content deemed to be risky in real time, while human reviewers handle nuanced or coded speech.

In policing, City Brains ingest data from millions of cameras, drones and Internet of Things sensors and use AI to identify suspects, track vehicles and predict unrest before it happens. In Xinjiang, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform aggregates data from cameras, phone scanners and informants to generate risk scores for individuals, enabling pre-emptive detention based on behavioural patterns rather than specific crimes.

On platforms such as Douyin, the state does not just delete content; it algorithmically suppresses dissent while amplifying ‘positive energy’. AI links surveillance data directly to narrative control and police action.

What are the human rights impacts?

These AI systems erode the rights to freedom of expression, privacy and a fair trial.

Historically, online censorship meant deleting a post. Today, generative AI engages in ‘informational gaslighting’. When ASPI researchers showed an Alibaba LLM a photograph of a protest against human rights violations in Xinjiang, the AI described it as ‘individuals in a public setting holding signs with incorrect statements’ based on ‘prejudice and lies’. The technology subtly engineers reality, preventing users accessing objective historical truths.

AI also undermines the right to a fair trial. In courts that lack judicial independence, AI systems that recommend sentences or predict recidivism act as a black box that defence lawyers cannot scrutinise.

Pervasive surveillance changes behaviour even when not actively used, so its chilling effect may be as significant as direct deployment. Knowing their conversations may be monitored, people self-censor online and in private messaging. Emotion recognition in prisons takes this further: people can theoretically be flagged for their internal states of mind. It’s not just actions that are punished, but also thoughts.

Which groups are most affected?

While AI-enabled surveillance affects all people, ethnic minorities such as Koreans, Mongolians, Tibetans and Uyghurs are disproportionately targeted.

Mainstream LLMs are trained primarily in Mandarin, leaving little commercial incentive to develop AI for minority languages. The Chinese state, however, views those languages as a security vulnerability. State-funded institutions, including the National Key Laboratory at Minzu University, are building LLMs in minority languages, not for cultural preservation, but to power public-opinion control and prevention platforms. These scan text, audio and video in Tibetan and Uyghur to detect cultural advocacy, dissent or religious activity.

Feminist activists, human rights lawyers — particularly since the 709 crackdown in 2015 — labour activists and religious minorities including Falun Gong practitioners face disproportionate targeting. Chinese models consistently adopt state-aligned narratives about such groups, labelling Falun Gong a cult and avoiding human rights framing. Since 2020, Hong Kongers have also been subject to National Security Law surveillance using many of the same tools deployed on the mainland, a reminder that this infrastructure can be rapidly extended.

How can activists in China protect themselves?

Protecting oneself inside China is increasingly difficult. AI leaves very few blind spots. But the system is not perfectly omniscient.

Activists have historically relied on coded speech, euphemisms and satire, the classic example being the use of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ to refer to President Xi Jinping. Because AI struggles with cultural nuance and evolving memes, new linguistic workarounds can temporarily bypass automated filters. But this is a relentless game of Whac-a-Mole: Chinese tech companies employ thousands of human content reviewers whose only job is to catch new memes and feed them back into the AI.

The most practical steps are to use VPNs to access blocked platforms, secure communications apps such as Signal and separate devices for sensitive work. None of these are foolproof. VPN use is technically illegal and increasingly detected and Signal can only be accessed via VPN. It helps to keep a minimal digital footprint and communicate face-to-face on sensitive matters. For activists in Xinjiang, however, surveillance is so pervasive that individual precautions offer little protection. Strong international networks and rigorous documentation practices are essential.

Is China exporting these technologies?

China is the world’s largest exporter of AI-powered surveillance technology, marketing these systems globally, particularly to the global south.

The Chinese state is purposefully expanding its minority-language public-opinion monitoring software throughout Belt and Road Initiative countries, effectively extending its censorship apparatus to monitor Tibetan and Uyghur diaspora communities abroad. Chinese companies including Dahua, Hikvision, Huawei and ZTE have deployed surveillance and ‘safe city’ systems across over 100 countries, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates among the most significant recipients. Critically, these companies operate under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires cooperation with state intelligence, meaning data flowing through these systems could be accessible to Beijing as well as to purchasing governments.

China is also exporting its governance model through the open-source release of its LLMs, embedding Chinese censorship norms into foundational infrastructure used by developers worldwide.

What should the international community do?

The international community must recognise that countering this requires regulatory pushback.

First, democratic states should set minimum transparency standards for public procurement. This means refusing to purchase AI models that conceal political or historical censorship and mandating that providers publish a ‘moderation log’ with refusal reason codes so users know when content is restricted for political reasons.

Second, states should enact ‘safe-harbour laws’ to protect civil society organisations, journalists and researchers who audit AI models for hidden censorship. Currently, doing so can breach corporate terms of service.

Third, strict export controls should block the transfer of repression-enabling technologies to authoritarian regimes, while companies providing public-opinion management services should be excluded from democratic markets. Existing targeted sanctions on companies such as Dahua and Hikvision for their role in Xinjiang should be enforced more rigorously.

Finally, the international community must recognise that Chinese surveillance extends beyond China’s borders. Spyware targeting Tibetan and Uyghur activists in exile is well-documented, as is pressure on family members remaining in China. Rigorous documentation by international civil society remains essential for building the evidentiary record for future accountability.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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A sign outside the UN Secretariat building last year.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 18 2026 (IPS)

As the world continues to be weighed down in political and military turmoil, drones are being increasingly used as weapons of war in a rash of ongoing conflicts—including Ukraine vs Russia, Israel vs Palestine, US vs Iran and Israel vs Lebanon, plus in civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan and Haiti.

Described as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), drones have fundamentally transformed modern warfare, “offering a low-cost, high-impact form of air power, challenging traditional military doctrines and giving rise to new tactics and ethical debates”.

Once limited to major military powers like the U.S. and Israel, drones are now being used by numerous state and non-state actors, including militant groups and even organized crime cartels.

The use of drones, particularly in targeted killings and with increasing autonomy, has raised significant international debate regarding accountability, civilian casualties, and compliance with international humanitarian law

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said last week he was “appalled by the devastating impact on civilians of increasing drone attacks”, amid reports that more than 200 civilians have been killed by drones since 4 March alone in the Kordofan region, and in White Nile state.

“It is deeply troubling that despite multiple reminders, warnings and appeals, parties to the conflict in Sudan continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons with wide-area impacts in populated areas,” said Türk.

“I renew my call on them to abide fully with international humanitarian law in their use of these weapons, particularly the clear prohibition on directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects and infrastructure, and against any form of indiscriminate attacks.”

Many homes, schools, markets and health facilities were damaged or destroyed in the attacks, compounding the impacts on civilians and local communities, he said.

Meanwhile drones are also being used in the politically-troubled Haiti and also in the conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda despite a peace agreement brokered by the US last year.

According to a report in Cable News Network (CNN) March 17, the war in Iran is continuing to disrupt travel across the Gulf after Iranian drone strikes triggered two major air incidents in recent days. Flights at Dubai International Airport were briefly suspended on Monday after a drone struck a nearby fuel tank, igniting a large fire.

The shutdown forced cancellations and diversions as aviation authorities closed the airport. Part of the UAE’s airspace was also closed for a few hours overnight after the country said it was responding to incoming missiles and drone strikes from Iran.

Meanwhile, the prices of many global airfares that bypass the Middle East are rising, as the conflict drives up oil prices and airlines warn of higher fuel costs ahead, said CNN.

Focusing on a military perspective, Siemon Wezeman, Senior Researcher, Arms Transfers Programme, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS more and more states, (and also non-state armed- rebel – groups) acquire drones of all sizes.

“Some of the numbers are quite amazing – Ukraine getting not a few 1,000, but far over 10,000 drones from various suppliers, and Russia, Ukraine and Iran each use drones by the 100s almost every day in the current conflicts.”

And different from some 10 years ago, when most of the drones where for reconnaissance roles, he pointed out, today many drones are armed and many more are ‘one-way attack drones’ (also called suicide or kamikaze drones). The latter are becoming a cheap alternative for long-range missiles against ground targets.

In the SIPRI arms transfers database (https://armstransfers.sipri.org), he said, “we record transfers of all armed drones, and reconnaissance drones with a weight of at least 150kg (we had to put a weight limit to be able to keep monitoring drone transfers with the resources and sources we have)”.

“And we clearly see in recent years that a) the total numbers of drones transferred between states has grown, b) several non-state actors (e.g. Houthis and Hezbollah) have also been supplied with drones, c) the number of states and non-state actors that have acquired drone has grown – most states in the world have now acquired drones, many of them from foreign suppliers, d) the number of producers and suppliers has grown – the simpler drones are offered by dozens if not 100s of large and very small companies and that number is growing, and e) drones, and especially armed drones.”

That is the picture for flying drones, Wezeman said.

But also, sea drones (surface or submarine) are starting to become popular – even if not yet transferred in any significant number. And land drones are also starting to become popular, he declared.

At a press conference March 10, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said: “I’m really worried about drones in particular. I think the world has decided that it’s far more interested in spending enormous amounts of money developing these increasingly deadly weapons than it is on saving lives, and it seems to have decided that it hasn’t got time to work on ensuring that the rules that govern these weapons, these lethal autonomous weapons, keep up with the pace of technology.”

So you’ve got this dangerous alliance between very innovative technology and huge amounts of money and people’s desire to kill more people – and that’s a toxic combination, he said.

“And last year, 90 per cent of all deaths caused by drones were civilians, many of them humanitarians. And we’re seeing that across the crises on which we work – whether it’s Gaza, Sudan or in Ukraine, we’re seeing these bad practices move between crises”.

In the DRC last week, a senior official of the UN children’s agency UNICEF and two civilians were killed in drone strikes.

Amplifying further Wezeman said all these drones and one-way attack drones have become more capable, especially in range (the simple Shahed, one-way attack drones used by Iran and sold to Russia have a range of up to 1500 to 2000km), changing them from tactical battlefield weapons to more strategic weapons.

Development is very rapidly continuing for all type of drones, including making them more autonomous and intelligent to be capable of independent targeting and other decision-making. AI plays a growing role in this process. This process leads to questions about control, but right now it seems the process is moving faster than the discussion on controlling the autonomous aspects (see also our programme on emerging technologies.

https://www.sipri.org/research/armament-and-disarmament/emerging-military-and-security-technologies.

Will they replace systems with a human on board or in the loop? The development goes certainly that way and for missiles and one-way attack drones that has already started. For the larger, more capable and more complex systems such as combat aircraft, warships and larger combat vehicles that is still a future – but not a distant dream as development of for example drone combat aircraft is already moving into prototypes in the USA, China, Australia and Europe.

There still is an element of doubt however – drones need navigation that now is largely based on GPS-type systems, something that is not free from the risks of being jammed or stopped.

The simpler drones, with their simple technology, cheap and easy to produce are also not as effective as hoped. Most of them are rather easy prey for air-defence systems (or jamming) – while Russia, Iran and Ukraine send every day dozens or 100s to attack their opponents, most do no reach their target but are shot down or lost due to jamming or other causes, declared Wezeman.

Meanwhile Human Rights Watch said last week its latest research on “how Haitian security forces and private contractors working with them have conducted extensive and apparently unlawful lethal drone strikes in densely populated areas killing and injuring residents who were not members of criminal groups, including children”.

“We call on Haitian authorities to urgently rein in the security forces and private contractors working for them before more children die”, said HRW.

According to data from multiple sources reviewed by Human Rights Watch, at least 1,243 people were killed by drone strikes in 141 operations between March 1, 2025, and January 21, 2026, including at least 43 adults who were reportedly not members of criminal groups, and 17 children. The data also shows that the drone strikes injured 738 people, at least 49 of whom were reportedly not members of criminal groups.

“Dozens of ordinary people, including many children, have been killed and injured in these lethal drone operations,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Haitian authorities should urgently rein in the security forces and private contractors working for them before more children die.”

The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti has attributed the drone attacks in Haiti to a specialized “Task Force” established by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé that is operated with support from the private military company Vectus Global.

The US ambassador to Haiti has confirmed that the US State Department issued a license to Vectus Global to export defense services to Haiti.

Thalif Deen, Senior Editor, Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, was a former Director, Foreign Military Markets at Defense Marketing Services; Senior Defense Analyst at Forecast International; military editor Middle East/Africa at Jane’s Information Group and UN correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly, London.

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A gathering organised for the families of victims of Duterte's war on drugs in Quezon City ahead of the opening of the ICC confirmation hearing. The signs which are held up in a few of the pictures read: 'Justice! Jail everyone involved in the war on drugs.' Credit: IDEFEND

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Mar 17 2026 (IPS)

Gito* had just arrived at his father’s house in Caloocan City in the Philippines on December 7, 2016, when three armed policemen burst into the home, grabbed his father, took him outside and shot him multiple times. Gito told IPS his father had put his hands up when the officers told him they had come to arrest him, but they opened fire anyway.

Then they turned on Gito, who was 15 at the time and had come to see his father to get his lunch money for school. He says they told him his father was a drug dealer and that he would be facing charges because he was with him. He was taken away and tortured – beaten and forced to drink urine – and later jailed for three years. He and his four siblings were all forcibly separated; his mother’s mental health deteriorated, and even after release, Gito needed years of mental health help.

Andrea*, from the same city, told IPS a similar story. One day in October 2017, she and her husband and father-in-law were watching television at their home when two men wearing masks and black jackets and carrying guns burst in, shouting the name of a person none of them knew. Despite their protestations, the two men executed her husband and father-in-law, shooting them many times while they knelt in front of them. Andrea, who was five months pregnant at the time, was also injured in the shooting – a bullet hit her leg.

A priest prays at a gathering organised for the families of victims of Duterte’s war on drugs in Quezon City, ahead of the opening of the ICC confirmation hearing. Credit: IDEFEND

Left without any means of income with both the family’s breadwinners dead, she had to drop out of the vocational course she was on and spiralled into a deep depression. She eventually recovered. “When I looked at my baby, I saw my husband in her, so I picked myself up and faced life bravely,” she explained. She said, though, it is still hard financially, as she also supports her mother-in-law.

Gito’s father, and Andrea’s husband and father-in-law, were just a few of the estimated tens of thousands of victims of the brutally repressive anti-drugs policy implemented by former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.

For years, people like Gito and Andrea have fought an often seemingly futile battle for justice for their loved ones even as local and international rights groups have detailed the horrific crimes committed under Duterte’s “war on drugs”.

But a recent hearing at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, has given them, and others, hope that they could see justice.

Both Gito and Andrea, along with other relatives of people who were killed under Duterte’s violent crackdown on drug use, were at the Hague during confirmation hearings between February 23 and 27 to decide whether Duterte should stand trial on charges of crimes against humanity linked to his deadly anti-drug crackdown.

Launched in 2016, it remains one of the deadliest anti-narcotics campaigns in modern history, activists say. While official police figures show 6,252 people killed by May 2022, human rights groups estimate there could have been as many as 30,000 deaths, including vigilante-style executions.

The case against Duterte covers 49 incidents of alleged murder and attempted murder, involving 78 victims, including children. But prosecutors at the hearing said these incidents are only a fraction of the thousands of killings attributed to police and hired hitmen during Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.

At the trial the prosecution said that Duterte played a “pivotal” role in a campaign of extrajudicial killings that saw thousands murdered, alleging he personally drew up death lists, incited murders and then boasted about them afterwards.

The court was shown videos of Duterte threatening to murder alleged drug users and boasting of his own skills in extrajudicial killing.

Statements from victims’ relatives submitted at the trial also highlighted the devastating toll the repressive policy had taken on not just individual families but also wider communities which were already impoverished and marginalised.

Illegal drug use in impoverished communities was often a mechanism, the prosecution said when submitting witness testimony, to cope with terrible living conditions. They said victims’ marginalised and vulnerable conditions were exacerbated exponentially when targeted by police and that the campaign against them targeted their humanity.

The prosecution pointed out that victims were often killed in front of their families, usually in their homes and local neighbourhoods, which subsequently became crime scenes. Following the killings, the families were left with not just lasting personal trauma but stigma within their close-knit communities.

Meanwhile, by targeting marginalised groups, law enforcement authorities were specifically going after those who would be least likely to be able to file complaints in the domestic justice system, human rights lawyers at the hearing argued. They said this was calculated to ensure no one was held accountable ultimately for what happened.

Duterte’s defence claimed the 80-year-old did not issue specific orders to kill drug suspects as part of his policy to take down the illegal drug trade in the country. They said that what actions he took were within the law. Duterte himself waived his right to attend the hearing and said he does not recognise the court’s authority.

The ICC has 60 days in which to issue a decision on whether to proceed with the case against Duterte, ask for more evidence, or stop the process against him.

Activists who were at the trial have expressed hope that the case against him will go ahead.

“It was very clear that the prosecution had enough [evidence] to convince the judges that the case should proceed to trial.

“The truth of the matter is that the evidence presented by the prosecution was backed up by true narratives by witnesses and by families themselves who saw how their loved ones were killed,” Rowena Legaspi, spokesperson for the Philippine group In Defense of Rights and Dignity Movement (IDEFEND), told IPS.

Both Gito and Andrea said they were convinced of the strength of the evidence presented, although Gito admitted he feared Duterte might still somehow not be tried.

“This is a grave concern for me. There are fears around political interference or procedural issues that Duterte’s defence may raise in an attempt to stop the proceedings. But I also trust the ICC process and the sufficient documents they have,” he said.

Activists also see the fact that the confirmation hearings have taken place at all as a step towards justice for the victims of Duterte’s drug crackdown.

“For the families of the victims in the court and those watching back in the Philippines, this was like seeing light at the end of the dark day when Duterte was the president. Reaching this stage of confirmation charges continues to at least gradually break the pain that is embedded in them,” Legaspi added.

“This case moving to trial is a step towards healing for all of us,” said Andrea.

Campaigners also see it as essential to ongoing campaigning for justice in the Philippines.

For years, domestic institutions failed to deliver justice, local rights groups say, with findings by rights institutions stonewalled, courts offering no meaningful accountability, and families of victims silenced by fear.

And while Duterte’s arrest and transfer to The Hague was a breakthrough in itself, activists say. They also point out that at the same time, his allies at home continue to push immunity bills and resolutions questioning ICC jurisdiction.

IDEFEND said the hearings are a political and moral test of whether international law can pierce impunity and whether Filipino society will stand with victims against state-sanctioned violence and a litmus test of the Filipino people’s pursuit of accountability.

“Duterte’s arrest and the ICC process prove persistence matters. Leaders cannot forever hide behind power, sovereignty, or dynasties. The law may be slow, but history bends toward accountability when people insist on truth.

“This case is not just about putting Duterte on trial. It affirms that the lives lost — mostly the poor and voiceless — mattered. It restores dignity to families. It exposes the machinery of state violence. And it warns future leaders that mass killings will not be tolerated,” Legaspi said.

“It also challenges the culture of impunity shielding not just Duterte but also his enablers and successors. Senate resolutions, immunity bills, and denial campaigns show the fight is far from over. But every manoeuvre is proof of accountability’s power: they are afraid because truth is catching up,” she added.

Meanwhile, other drug policy reform campaigners say it serves as an example of the massive damage that can be caused by repressive drug policies and sends a strong signal to other leaders implementing similarly brutal, hardline anti-drug campaigns.

“The large-scale human rights violations committed under Duterte’s war on drugs – which have resulted in tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings – are one of the starkest examples of the devastating impacts of punitive drug policies. And the Philippines is not an isolated case. Around the world, lethal force continues to be justified in the name of drug control – mostly in contexts of entrenched impunity,” Marie Nougier, Head of Research and Communications at the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), told IPS.

“The decision by the International Criminal Court to pursue the case of Duterte sends an important signal: drug control cannot be used as a pretext for unlawful killings and the erosion of fundamental rights, and that political leaders are not beyond the reach of international law,” she added.

Back in the Philippines, the drug policies Duterte implemented remain in place and there continue to be drug-related killings, although not at the levels seen under Duterte.

And nearly a decade on from when Duterte’s hardline policies were introduced, only nine police officers have been convicted. Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) say the vast majority of those responsible, including senior officials, have not faced any repercussions.

Legaspi said there have been some bills introduced by lawmakers on possible investigations of extrajudicial killings and discussion of treating drug use as a health issue rather than criminal and looking at harm-reduction measures to combat it.

She added, though, that Duterte’s drug policies had “an impact so huge that it continues to be felt to this day”.

Both Gito and Andrea said they were hopeful the hearings may bring about some change in the country’s drug policy.

In the meantime, though, both are waiting to see what the ICC decides and hoping for justice.

“For me, justice will be fully served when Duterte has been convicted and his co-perpetrators of the drug war have also been arrested, detained, and convicted. That is justice for me,” said Gito.

*Identity protected for their safety.
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Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women, addresses the opening of the Seventieth Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2026 (IPS)

The 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) has brought together global leaders, gender equity advocates, and youth representatives at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters to advance efforts to strengthen mechanisms for justice, equality, and representation for women and girls worldwide. With challenges particularly pronounced in conflict zones, this year’s priority theme —“ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls — focuses on repealing discriminatory laws and addressing persistent structural barriers that prevent women and girls from being fully heard, represented, and treated equally.

At the opening of the session in March 9, the CSW adopted its Agreed Conclusions, which emphasized the need to improve access to justice for women and girls, following a week of spirited discussions among member states. During these discussions, several countries, including the United States, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, proposed objections in which they sought to modify language that strongly supported these reforms and to revisit provisions from previous agreements.

These efforts elicited significant pushback from other member states, who argued that such objections would undermine years of progress in gender equity reforms. The Chair of the CSW ultimately decided to preserve some core elements of previous agreements while incorporating progressive changes.

As the Commission convened to adopt the outcome, efforts to halt these changes were brought forward by the U.S., which argued that the provisions included “controversial” and “ideological” issues. These efforts ultimately failed, gaining votes from only the U.S. Other states, including Egypt and Nigeria, called for a delay in the voting process to allow time for continued negotiations.

“At a time of severe backlash on human rights and multilateralism, the adoption of Agreed Conclusions that safeguard long-standing gender equality standards is a powerful signal that global commitments still matter and that attempts to turn back the clock will not go unchallenged,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“While the loss of consensus is disappointing, a weakened text – or no outcome at all – would have sent an especially troubling signal to women and girls who continue to face barriers to access to justice, and multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. In a climate marked by widespread impunity, Amnesty reiterates its calls on states to step up resistance to attacks on gender justice,” added Callamard.

Women currently hold only about 64 percent of the legal rights afforded to men, with “discriminatory laws and patriarchal norms” continuing to impede progress towards justice. These disparities are particularly pronounced in conflict settings, where women and girls face heightened risks of violence, displacement, and exclusion from justice, opportunities, and decision-making.

“We meet at a time of multiple global crises, peace eludes us, and the world is extremely and increasingly fragmented. And gender inequality is compounded by the evils of war and conflict, from Afghanistan to Haiti, to Iran, Myanmar, Palestine, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and beyond,” said UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous at the opening of the 70th session of the CSW. “When women and girls are denied justice, the damage goes far beyond any single case: it impacts the very fabric of our societies and good governance. Public trust erodes, institutions lose legitimacy, and the rule of law itself is weakened. A justice system that fails half the population cannot claim to uphold justice at all.”

Legal protections from discrimination and exploitation, and access to essential services are rapidly eroding, while female human rights defenders are increasingly under attack. Sexual and reproductive health rights are also being rolled back, and the UN has recorded an 87 percent increase in cases of conflict-related sexual violence over the past two years. Women and children in conflict zones continue to bear the heaviest burdens of violence and displacement. Currently, the number of women and girls living within 50 kilometers of deadly conflict is at its highest level in decades.

In commemoration of CSW70, IPS spoke with Anna, a 20 year-old Ukrainian activist and member of the UNICEF Global Girl Leaders Advisory Group. This initiative brings together 14 adolescent girl leaders from around the world who work to ensure that the perspectives of women and girls are represented in global decision-making, and present recommendations directly to the UNICEF Executive Board.

Anna was a teenager studying abroad when the conflict in Ukraine erupted, and was unable to return home to her family near the border. Since then, she has experienced significant challenges as a result of the war, compounded by limited access to essential services, such as education and psychosocial support, many of which have been disrupted or placed under strain by the war.

“When war begins, the changes in society are immediate and visible,” said Anna. “Frontlines move, cities are destroyed, and millions of people are forced to leave their homes. When many men go to the front, women often become the pillars holding communities together – running local initiatives, leading volunteer networks, managing businesses, and supporting families.”

Such shifts also bring structural struggles, as many women are forced to leave their homes and move with their children or elderly relatives. Such displacement can cause loneliness and uncertainty, Anna explained. While women take on more responsibility, inequality does not disappear. “Women still face salary gaps, stereotypes about leadership, and the expectation that they should both rebuild society and quietly carry the emotional labor of caring for everyone else. Stopping to fully process everything can feel impossible, because another responsibility, another task, or another crisis immediately takes its place.”

Anna speaking at a UNICEF-supported event dedicated to discussing the challenges and solutions for girls and young women in Ukraine who are not in education, employment or training. Credit: ISAR Ednannia /Serhii Piriev

In Ukraine today, roughly 32 percent of women aged 20-24 and nearly 49 percent of women aged 25-29 are left without access to education, employment, or training, compared to about 16.4 percent and 12.2 percent of men in the same age groups, respectively. In times of conflict, women are often the first to lose these opportunities and the last to regain them. Education for girls is often hardest-hit, as families are displaced and conflicts leave girls to take on added responsibilities to their families and support household incomes. Many are forced to drop out of school to keep their families afloat.

“My own educational journey has been deeply shaped by war. I was first displaced to Poland, and when I returned to Kharkiv for my senior year, continuing my studies was far from easy,” said Anna. “I consider myself incredibly privileged. I had a supportive family that believed in me and helped me keep going. But not every girl has that kind of support system – someone to catch her when she begins to fall behind.”

Additionally, the psychosocial strain of conflict and violence often leaves girls ill-equipped to engage in studies or training programs. With mechanisms for justice, healing, and empowerment for women and girls under attack, these challenges often go unheard, and impunity for sexual violence and abuse persists, leaving girls carrying significant amounts of trauma, anxiety, depression, and fear.

“Girls in crisis often carry a kind of psychological burden that is both invisible and personal – it is not only the direct exposure to violence, but the way war quietly settles into everyday life and into the body,” said Anna. “For many women and girls living near conflict zones, mental health is shaped by the constant proximity to violence. “You wake up, check the news, hear another siren, and feel what we call in Ukrainian a ‘ком в горлі’,’ or a lump in the throat.”

Sexual violence is particularly rampant near conflict zones, with Anna noting a persistent “climate of fear that reaches every woman who hears the story”. She added that many girls in Ukraine grow up with the knowledge that their bodies can become targets of violence. While girls are in school, studying for exams, or volunteering, many carry the awareness that women nearby have endured “unimaginable violence”.

According to a UN report, nearly 54 percent of surveyed countries reported having laws that do not correlate rape with the basis of consent, and roughly 75 percent of surveyed countries have laws that permit the forced marriage of a girl child. Additionally, 44 percent of countries lack laws that guarantee equal pay for women and girls. It is estimated that it could take 286 years to eliminate these gaps.

“The justice women and girls deserve, that is theirs by right, cannot wait. We must collectively pursue it, here at the United Nations, in our national laws and policies, in your court rooms and traditional justice mechanisms. In doing so, we must engage all of society, including men and boys and young people, to contribute to our collective effort for equality,” said Bahous.

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Credit: Marcelo Del Pozo/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Mar 16 2026 (IPS)

Once again, global oil prices are spiking, driven by the Israeli-US war against Iran. With Iran retaliating by attacking infrastructure and transport hubs and blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, oil supplies from the region are being choked, pushing up prices. The cost of a barrel of Brent crude – the international benchmark for oil prices – stood at US$73 before the conflict but has surged beyond US$100 since. It could go higher still as war continues.

The impacts are already being felt when drivers fill up their petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles. But they go much wider. Bigger household energy bills will likely result, while businesses will pass on their increased costs in the form of higher prices. Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and sparked a global cost-of-living crisis, and now, as many economies seemed to be recovering, the war in the Gulf has brought another shock. Impacts could be political as well as financial: in numerous countries, the cost-of-living crisis helped drive voters towards right-wing populist and nationalist politicians. Recent years have seen Gen Z-led protests erupt in countries around the world, fuelled in part by young people’s anger at failing economies.

In a world increasingly characterised by conflict and with powerful states tearing up the international rulebook in pursuit of material interests, more oil shocks and big economic and political impacts seem inevitable. Governments typically react with economic policies that fail to protect those with the least, and by meeting political unrest with repression. They should consider another way.

The world will remain vulnerable to oil price shocks only for as long as it stays dependent on oil. The climate crisis compels a rapid move away from fossil fuel dependency to abate the worst impacts of global heating. Increasingly, this should also be seen as a matter of economic and political security.

Some steps have been taken in the right direction. Renewables now provide over 30 per cent of global electricity. Investments in renewables more than double those in fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies have immense power and are determined not to give it up. That was reflected in the fact that 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists attended the latest global climate summit, COP30 in Brazil, and succeeded in preventing any new commitment to end fossil fuel extraction. Their power is shown in the lawsuit an oil company brought against Greenpeace, leading to a widely criticised trial in North Dakota, USA, with the campaigning organisation facing a punitive US$345 million damages bill. Their influence was reaffirmed by Donald Trump’s election win, after a campaign in which fossil fuel companies gave US$450 million in donations to Trump and his allies – and they were rewarded by US intervention in Venezuela.

Fossil fuel companies are determined to hold back the tide of renewables for as long as possible, because every day of delay is another day of profit, even though every fraction of a degree of temperature rise means avoidable suffering for millions of people. Delay is the new climate denial.

As the latest State of Civil Society Report points out, civil society’s working to make the difference, urging governments to hasten the transition and calling on global north states to make funding available for global south states to decarbonise and adapt to climate impacts. Civil society is exposing the environmental devastation caused by extraction and the complicity of fossil fuel companies in human rights abuses. Its strategies include advocacy, public campaigning, protests, direct action and, increasingly, litigation.

In 2025, climate litigation scored some big successes. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an unprecedented advisory opinion, ruling that states have a legal duty to prevent environmental harm, which requires them to mitigate emissions and adapt to climate change. This victory originated in civil society: in 2019, student groups from eight countries formed the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change network to persuade their governments to seek an ICJ ruling.

Following extensive civil society engagement, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a similar ruling. The African Court for Human and Peoples’ Rights is set to issue its advisory opinion following a petition brought by the African Climate Platform, a civil society coalition.

These rulings can seem symbolic, but they strengthen national-level efforts to hold states and corporations accountable. These have paid off recently too. In 2025, two South African groups stopped an offshore oil project after a court found its environmental assessments were deeply flawed. More litigation is coming, including in New Zealand, where civil society has filed a lawsuit after the government weakened its emissions reduction plan.

But civil society faces a backlash. Around the world, climate and environmental activists and their allies, Indigenous and land rights defenders, experience severe state and corporate repression.

Last year in Uganda, authorities arrested 11 activists for protesting against the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. In Peru, police used teargas and non-lethal weapons against people blocking a road to protest against a mine. In Cambodia, five young activists from the Mother Nature environmental group have been in jail since July 2024.

The French government has repeatedly vilified environmental campaigners and deployed police violence against protests, while last year the German government launched an inquiry into public funding of environmental groups and the Dutch parliament adopted a motion condemning Extinction Rebellion and urging the removal of its tax-exempt status.

As the latest oil price shocks reverberate around the global economy, governments should learn the lessons. As economies deteriorate, the temptation will be to say that transition is a luxury, something that can be put off even further. This is the wrong lesson: recent research in the UK suggests that the cost of achieving net zero will be about the same as the cost of another oil price crisis. Economic and political security lies in ending fossil fuel dependency as quickly as possible. To learn the right lessons, governments should stop repressing climate activism and instead listen to and work with civil society.

Andrew Firmin isCIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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On 5 March, thousands of people, including many children, fled their homes in the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut, with many gathering in the streets or attempting to reach safer areas. Children are among the most affected as families face displacement, uncertainty and limited access to essential services. Credit: UNICEF Lebanon

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 2026 (IPS)

During a solidarity visit to Lebanon, the UN chief announced a flash appeal of USD 308.3 million to support humanitarian operations there in the wake of escalated fighting.

The humanitarian appeal is intended to reach the more than 816,000 people within Lebanon that have been displaced due to the most recent fighting in the Middle East region. Nearly two weeks since the United States, Israel and Iran engaged in a military offensive, this has brought about a new wave of displacement and civilian casualties impacting the entire region.

The appeal comes at a time of increased fighting between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that at least 634 people have been killed and more than 1500 have been injured since the start of the fighting on March 2. The number of displaced people is expected to rise as Israeli evacuation orders force people, including up to 300,000 children, to flee to safety. The fighting reached further escalation on Thursday, Israeli forces launched missiles parts of the southern suburbs and the Bashoura neighborhood in Beirut.

On Friday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres began a solidarity visit to Lebanon, coming straight from Ankara, Türkiye. He met with Lebanese leadership, including Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun, to discuss the current situation. He has called for all parties to end the hostilities and for negotiations that would respect Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Guterres commended the work of UN agencies and humanitarian partners in delivering essential needs and to local communities supporting those impacted.

“These efforts are saving lives. But they need a big boost of support,” Guterres said on Friday. “The Flash Appeal we launch today will sustain and expand life‑saving assistance over the next three months – including food, clean water, health care, education, protection, and other vital services. Its success depends on swift, flexible funding – and on ensuring that humanitarian workers can safely reach those most in need.”

According to UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, since March 12 the UN and its humanitarian partners have distributed 632,000 hot meals and 18,000 ready-to-eat meals, and have provided more than 2000 liters of bottled water and over 1700 cubic meters of clean water.

Additional funding from the UN system has also been mobilized to support Lebanon. Earlier this week, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher announced that USD 15 million would be mobilized from the Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF), along with a reserve allocation from the Lebanon Humanitarian Fund.

Fletcher warned the UN Security Council that humanitarian workers’ ability to reach people was “tightening by the day”, as they must navigate within active conflict zones and key transport routes are blocked due to debris, making it more difficult to reach affected communities.

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A street scene in Kabul.

By External Source
KABUL, Mar 12 2026 (IPS)

In the bone-chilling Afghanistan winter, a woman was dragged into a public square early this year and publicly lashed for a crime she may or not have committed. According to the ruling handed by the Taliban Supreme Court, the woman and the male culprit who was jointly accused of extra-marital affair received 30 lashes each and a one-year suspended prison sentence. The sentence was carried out in the presence of several local officials and residents in a province whose name is left out to protect the victim.

For Roya, (not her real name), a woman whose life has already been scarred by years of psychological and emotional distress, 30 blows of lashes in corporeal punishment amounts to an extra dose of salt into her wound. She lost her husband six years ago, in a traffic accident, leaving her to raise five children as a single mother.

Faced with crushing poverty Roya has worked as a farm laborer on other people’s land, but with the onset of the winter and agricultural work drying up, she migrated to the city where she cleaned houses, washed clothes and hand-stitched embroidered men’s collars under the dim light of a lamp at night. Naqeeba (also not her real name), a neighbor who has known Roya for years, speaks approvingly of her great sense of dignity. The money she earned through this work was little, but Roya never asked anyone for help, says Naqueeba.

She tried to cover the costs of living in whatever way she could and it was the constant need to create job-seeking opportunities by frequent daily travels, which rather became labeled as improper marital relations, bringing on her punishment rather than reward.

“She became a victim of circumstances, not a criminal,” Naqeeba, says, adding, “the charge was false.”

According to Naqeeba, Roya didn’t even get a chance to defend herself. She was on her way home and nearby her own house when she was seized “like a dangerous criminal,” thrown into a vehicle, and taken away without anyone knowing where she was taken to or what she had been accused of.

A Charge She Did Not Deserve

“This was not a simple blow. It was a strike that, as long as she lives, she will never be able to hold her head high again in this neighborhood”, Naqueeba explains further with her voice filled with anger and sorrow. She pauses and continues: “For a week, no one knew whether she was alive or what had happened to her until news of her public flogging emerged”.

The repeated public corporal punishments, especially against women, have not only instilled fear in society but also raised serious questions about justice, human dignity, and the status of women in today’s Afghanistan.

Roya’s story is not just the story of one individual; it reflects the suffering of thousands of women who live in silence under the weight of poverty, loneliness, and restrictions, and who are punished simply for being women. The day she was flogged marked the fourth public corporal punishment of women in that province in less than two months, during December and January a trend that has fueled waves of fear, anxiety, and silence, particularly among women in the region.

According to a report by Hasht e Subh Daily Media, in 2025, the Taliban publicly flogged 225 people in Kabul alone. This means that people were flogged at least every other day in the capital. Several other provinces carried out dozens of public floggings each.

The report reveals that confessions were often extracted under pressure. The accused were denied legal assistance and a fair trial. The Taliban rely on corporal punishment and public displays of force, which violate human rights and cause severe social and psychological consequences for the victims.

The Taliban abolished the Attorney General’s Office and shut down the Independent Bar Association of Afghanistan in November 2021, thus effectively blocking the path to legal defense.

In 2025, Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur along with other UN experts, on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, consistently condemned the Taliban’s increased use of public flogging and other forms of corporal punishment, describing them as “inhuman and cruel”. Throughout the year, he highlighted the alarming rise in these practices, noting that they often occur without due process or fair trial standards.

“The Taliban must immediately end the death penalty and all corporal punishment that amounts to torture or other cruel and inhuman treatment, and respect the rights and dignity of all detainees,” Bennett and other experts stressed.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

The dead Ali Khamenei hands over the Iranian flag to a mirror image of his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. From the web site https://english.khamenei.ir/

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Mar 12 2026 (IPS)

The US/Israeli war on Iran might be like messing with a hornets’ nest, spreading fear and chaos all around. The Israeli government claimed that the war was a “preventive” measure to address an immediate threat of Iran constructing a nuclear bomb. However, this war has obviously been meticulously planned over a long period of time and it now seemed to be the right time to put this plan into action. The Iranian air defences had been weakened through earlier attacks, while recent Israeli strikes decapitated Hezbollah’s Lebanese leadership, Iran’s allies north of Israel. With Gaza destroyed and Syria’s unreliable Assad gone, Netanyahu had succeeded in securing his party’s coalition with the far-right and could continue to count upon the support of the Trump Administration, providing Israel with a free hand vis-à-vis the Palestinians and turning a blind eye to the massacre of civilians. The U.S. is continuously supporting Isreal with missile-defence systems, coordination, cooperation, and intelligence sharing.

It appears as if the U.S./Israeli forces now intend to bomb everything in Iran – from its highest leaders, down to police stations and thus hope that Iran will exhaust its defence capacities. The aggressors furthermore claim they intend to achieve an Iranian regime change. However, even if Iran’s ninety-two million people now are trapped between a bloody war and a repressive regime it is highly unlikely that a tolerant government will emerge from a battered rump version of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is more probable that such a state will be governed by leaders even more determined to cling to their power after gaining more confidence after overcoming a terrible crisis. U.S. actions seem to be more improvised than Israel’s and it seems that they have not learned from the Afghanistan failure, i.e. the difficulties in achieving and maintaining a regime change through military means.

The U.S. government rejoiced from the killing of Ali Khamenei – a mid-ranking cleric who did not meet the constitutional requirements of being a marja, i.e. a cleric enabled to make legal decisions for followers and clerics below him in rank. Instead, Khamenei was during his 36 years and six months in power forced to rely on his close ties with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Now, in spite of the fact that the Iranian revolution’s father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had declared that “hereditary succession is sinister, evil, and invalid,” Khamenei’s son has been elected as Supreme Leader. So far Mojtaba Khamenei has acted in the shadow of his father and few Iranians have heard him speak. He has not made any public appearances, never given a sermon, or made any declarations; just working in close relation with the leaders of IRGC.

Whereas the Iranian Army acts as protector of the nation’s sovereignty, the IRGC “safeguards” the Islamic Republic. With more than 125,000 members it serves as Iran’s coast guard, operates a media outlet called Sepah News, and controls the nuclear program. From its origins as an ideological militia, the IRGC now controls nearly every aspect of Iranian politics, economy (including energy and food industries), as well as the nation’s social life. It counts upon a paramilitary volunteer militia with 90,000 active personnel. One of IRGC’s branches is the Qods Force, which specialises in unconventional warfare and military intelligence operations.

The presence, terror and fear created by IRGC have made it difficult for any internal opposition to get organised. In Iran there is nothing akin to the African National Congress with leaders like Nelson Mandela. If a leader would arise from the mess created by the U.S. and Israel it would more likely be a man like Alia Ardashir Larijani, a former commander of the IRGC who holds a B.Sc. in computer science and mathematics, as well as a PhD in Western philosophy.

Larijani has served as deputy minister in various cabinets, been head of the Republic’s broadcasting service, and Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Larijani also served as Iran’s top nuclear envoy. However, in late March 2025 he stated that if Iran would be attacked by the United States and Israel, the nation would have no other choice than to develop nuclear weapons. Larijani is accused of having played a key role in the deadly crackdown against opposition protests that gripped the country in January this year. Since the end of December 2025, he is regarded to be the de facto leader of Iran and after originally opposing the election of Mojtaba Khamenei, Larijani has now rallied his supporters behind the newly elected Supreme Leader.

Apart from the fear of an internal collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there are concerns about the economic effects of the current war. Beyond the physical damage, Epic Fury has been quite costly for the Trump Administration that so far has deployed nearly half of the United States’ air power and roughly a third of its naval assets. So far, the Pentagon has not released an official estimate of the cost of the war, but it is currently believed to be USD 2 billion per day. Meanwhile, stocks have plunged all over the world and the price of crude oil spiked from USD 65 per barrel to USD 120 after the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified gas passes, had been effectively closed.

89 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments used to pass through the Strait, while Kuwait and Qatar shipped 100 percent, Iraq 97 percent and the United Arab Emirates 66 percent. Qatar has so far been worst hit, particularly since it took the place of Russia for liquified gas exports to Europe. Kuwait has now been forced to suspended its production and export of crude oil and liquefied natural gas (of which it is second to the U.S. as the world’s largest provider).

Winners of this situation are large net energy exporters outside the Gulf whose ability to sell abroad remains unaffected, such as Norway, Russia and Canada, and to a lesser degree Nigeria and Angola. Not the least the U.S. is a winner thanks to its expanding fracking industry. At the other end of the spectrum sit economies where energy imports account for a large share of their GDP. This group includes countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India and China, as well as most European economies including France, Germany and the UK.

It has even been speculated that the war on Iran is a means of USA to hurt China’s economy. In 2025, China bought more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil, around 12 percent of China’s crude oil imports, while approximately 3 percent came from Venezuela (now subjugated by the U.S.).

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year strategic partnership, meaning that China promised to invest USD 400 billion in exchange for keeping Iranian oil flowing. China does not view its “alliances” in the same way the West does, meaning that its government does not sign mutual defence treaties and will not come rushing to its allies’ aid. However, an unpredictable and dysfunctional actor as the U.S. has become under the Trump administration is a great source of unease for Beijing. Worries worsened by the fact that China’s annual economic growth target has reached its lowest level since 1991. Even as Beijing continues its rapid development of high-tech and renewables industries the country is currently battling with low consumption levels, a prolonged property crisis, and a huge local debt.

A big economy like China’s, as well as other wealthy nations, might find means to mitigate rising oil prices, but it’s much worse for smaller, poorer nations. Disruptions to energy supply as a result of a prolonged conflict will have far greater ramifications economically in the Global South than in the West. As an example, a country like Bangladesh, which is particularly dependent on Middle Eastern oil, not least for its garment industry, has already imposed daily limits on fuel sales after panic buying and stockpiling raised concerns about supply. Furthermore, approximately 13 million Bangladeshi expatriates are currently supporting the country’s economic stability through their remittances, of them 8 million live and work within the Middle East.

The same is true of Pakistan, with over 11 million Pakistanis living and working abroad, mainly in the Gulf states. In January 2025 alone, the country received USD 3 billion in remittances, reflecting a 25 percent year-on-year surge. Furthermore, Pakistan shares a 900-kilometre border with Iran and a collapse of Iran into civil war is a constant worry for Pakistan, which also maintains a military relationship with Saudi Arabia with an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Pakistani troops stationed in the kingdom. If the situation worsens, as Saudi infrastructure is hit any further, it is only a matter of time that Saudi Arabia will ask Pakistan to contribute towards its defence. Pakistan’s border areas with Iran and its huge Shia population (generally well-disposed towards their fellow believers on the other side of the frontier) are already highly volatile and if internal strife within Iran spills over the border, the fallout for Pakistan would be severe. Pakistan is furthermore recently engaged in a war with Afghanistan. On 6 March, Pakistan carried out air strikes in more than twenty locations across Afghanistan, while the Taliban targeted dozens of Pakistani border posts.

Other neighbouring nations to Iran are equally nervous. In Turkmenistan prices have almost doubled compared with pre-war levels. With an average salary of around USD 714 a large portion of the population is hard hit, since Turkmenistan is importing a considerable amount of industrial goods from Iran – like steel, construction materials, and petrochemicals, as well as food and household items that constitute a critical lifeline for many of its residents.

Turkey is also alarmed by the present situation and worries what will happen if Iran collapses into warring factions. If the U.S./Israel confrontation with Iran deepens, particularly in ways that involve regime change with a spillover effect on Turkey, or security implications as a result of expanded U.S./Israeli cooperation with hostile Kurdish militants, this war could quickly evolve into another fault line in U.S.-Turkish relations.

To sum up – the U.S./Israel attack on Iran is very unlikely to result in a regime change, but might instead result in a chaotic and bloody collapse of the entire country. The war is a high-risk game that might have dangerous effects not only on Iran and its immediate neighbours, but the entire world as well.

IPS UN Bureau

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CIVICUS discusses the situation in Venezuela following US intervention and the ousting of President Nicolás Maduro with Verónica Zubillaga, a Venezuelan sociologist who specialises in urban violence, state repression and community responses to armed violence.

Verónica Zubillaga

Is the recently announced amnesty a real opening or a strategic manoeuvre?

We are at an unprecedented crossroads. Venezuela and its Chavista regime, under US tutelage and despite two decades of anti-imperialist rhetoric, are reconfiguring themselves in such a way that some opening could result. However, there is still a risk that an authoritarian model will be consolidated, with economic and humanitarian concessions, but without real democratisation.

The release of political prisoners — a constant demand in all negotiations with international support, and a low-cost form of early opening for the interim government that has taken over from Maduro — could function as a stepping stone towards democratisation. The restoration of civil, political and social rights will be a difficult and lengthy struggle in this context of such deprivation, in which our rights have been violated for so long.

In the first half of February, there were partial and gradual releases, but hundreds of people remained in detention. The enactment of the Amnesty Law on 19 February has accelerated the releases.

The announcement was presented as a political concession, not as a recognition of the extensive human rights violations committed by Maduro’s government. There has been no mention yet of initiating processes to seek the truth, hold those responsible accountable, provide reparations or dismantle the repressive apparatus, which are urgent.

We therefore need to react with caution. The release of people deprived of their liberty for political reasons is essential, but it cannot replace a broader agenda of justice, reparation and institutional transformation.

How has civil society worked to keep this issue at the centre of the debate?

The cause of political prisoners is cross-cutting. There are detained people of different ages, social classes and political backgrounds. In a society as polarised as ours, this is one of the few causes around which there is broad consensus.

After the results of the presidential election of 28 July 2024, which the opposition clearly won, were disregarded, it was mainly people from the working classes who took to the streets to protest. Many young people, including teenagers, were arrested and imprisoned. This situation significantly deepened the social dimension of the problem, highlighted the break between the ruling party and its traditional base and consolidated the brutally authoritarian nature and illegitimacy of Maduro’s government.

There is also an important gender dimension. While many young men are in prison, it is women – mothers, sisters and other relatives – who have organised committees, vigils and public actions demanding their release. Symbolically, the figure of the grieving mother demanding the release of her children is particularly powerful. It is a symbol that appeals to the Latin American imagination about women and their cries for democratisation, justice and reparation in the context of crumbling authoritarian regimes.

Recently, the demand for the release of political prisoners has also been raised by the student movement in its call for a rally at the Central University of Venezuela. After a year and a half of brutal repression following the 2024 election, which emptied the streets and created a climate of widespread fear, any public demonstration is a significant sign that could trigger a chain of progressive demands and the vindication of civil, political and social rights.

What has been the impact of the USA’s renewed interest in Venezuelan oil?

It is clear that the Trump administration is fixated on oil and investment opportunities and completely disregards democracy and human rights. The part of the opposition represented by María Corina Machado has been stunned by its exclusion from key decision-making despite its efforts to gain Donald Trump’s attention. This exclusion has altered the internal political balance.

Historically, there has been tension within the Venezuelan opposition between those who favour resorting to external pressure and those who prioritise internal negotiation strategies. Since 2014, two main strategies have coexisted: one that is more confrontational, demanding the immediate end of the government, and another favouring negotiation or elections. Civil society mirrors these same divisions. One of the difficulties of the Venezuelan process is this constant fragmentation and internal disagreements within the opposition. As the government has become more authoritarian, these divisions have prevented more powerful coordinated political action. It is important for the opposition to coordinate strategies and, instead of wearing itself down in these disagreements, coordinate efforts to move strategically between confrontation and negotiation.

Whenever the opposition has managed to coordinate, as in the 2015 legislative and 2024 presidential elections, it made significant gains. During the 2024 campaign led by Machado, the opposition achieved an unprecedented level of coordination, generating enormous collective hope, particularly with regard to the prospect of family reunification in a country with over eight million migrants. This situation affects people of all social classes and political ideologies. But in response, the government redoubled its repression and consolidated the dictatorship. This led to frustration, demobilisation and further fragmentation. The opposition lacked a long-term strategy to sustain its gains and withstand setbacks. This is still one of the biggest challenges today.

What should the international community do to contribute to real democratisation?

The international community, and Latin American states in particular, could have taken a firmer stance after the 2024 electoral fraud. Silence and a lukewarm approach weakened the defence of democracy. Now it should not repeat that mistake. Beyond Maduro’s profound delegitimisation, the US military operation in Venezuela is a sign of what could happen to any Latin American country under the US government’s new national security strategy.

With the USA as an imperial power primarily concerned with its geostrategic interests and oil resources, demands for democratisation may take a back seat. An authoritarian model that is economically stable but without real democratisation could become entrenched.

In this context, the USA’s prioritisation of energy interests is worrying. It is an unprecedented scenario in which external intervention and the permanence of the ruling party in power coexist. The situation is highly volatile, and this has only just begun. A period of instability and political violence could follow if the civil-military coalition in power breaks down, which may happen given the tradition of anti-imperialist discourse rooted in the armed forces during the two and a half decades of Chavista rule.

Ironically, the USA’s focus on energy interests could result in the defence of sovereignty becoming a new unifying cause for the Venezuelan opposition, potentially leading to basic agreements between the ruling party post-Maduro and the opposition to defend Venezuelan oil interests. What’s at stake is recovering politics as an exercise involving conflict and struggle, as well as recognition and exchange for democratic coexistence — something we have lost, particularly over the past decade.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent

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